Dead of Night
by Demyrie
Summary: A man with no name. An unsuspecting but concerned coroner who should have been an artist. A vampire with a penchant for scalpels. A dead little boy who wants to find out what he left behind. Swap-AU vampWorth/humanConrad and platonic human.../zombieHanna
1. Dead of Night

A/N: Ur. I don't even know.

I feel reluctant to plunge ahead in the story and write the kind of crazy-intensive fanfic I usually do, because I don't know what SUPER-vital changes Miss Tessa is going to bust out. Not that I'm concerned with having my fiction be relevant, but it sounds rather lame to say "So UM I totally wrote this when I didn't know that THIS was THAT and before ALL THAT OTHER STUFF happened so just sort of pretend that it didn't". I know she's got kickass plot for us, and I don't even want to BEGIN to infringe on that.

SO HELLO THERE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE, HOW ARE YOU.

It's a swap-game, which I've seen others do before and it interested the hell out of me. Otherwise I did it all for the vampire-Worth, which spawned from a cosplay joke between myself and RaeHimura and has got to be the fucking scariest thing ever. Kinda proud of the twist on Conrad, though. It'll grow on you, or I hope it will. He's the angry ex-paranoiac we all know and love, he's just found another profession that will make people leave him alone.

This is like LEAPING into the second chapter, except I don't even know what the first chapter is. Go me. WOO. **I'd also ask that you read chapters one and two before axing it: this fic has two distinct plot-lines and 'feel's and if you get through chapter two and you still dislike it, you're never going to like it but thanks for playing!**

_Warnings: language, violence, sexual content/innuendo_

_Pairings: Worth/Conrad and bromantic …/Hanna._

Dotdotdot is more like a shepard to Hanna than anything. Oh and uh Conrad is openly gay, or at least self-admitted gay. And Worth's just Worth. Which means horny. And awful. And shut-up-yer-gonna-like-it flavored.

Mmmmm.

* * *

Dead of Night

* * *

"I placed the time of death at about five hours before his body was recovered, but the first cuts are at least two days old. The rest of them, particularly the ones on his thighs and feet, seem too ordered and ritualistic to be the work of defense or otherwise and they all range from twenty-four to ten hours old."

_Say it_, he told himself, swallowing against the lump in his throat. _Say it. If there's one man who won't look at you like you're crazy, it's him._

"He was, uh… played with. I think."

The tall man nodded, as if he wasn't surprised by the information or Dr. Achenleck's gruesome assumption. Handsome and broad-shouldered and sporting the most attentive almond eyes that three a.m. had to offer, the Detective scrubbed at his chin briefly and put out his gloved hand.

"What kind of weapon — " he used the word politely and cautiously, as if there were others standing around in the chilly examination room, " – do you think could have inflicted the wounds?"

"Nothing in any, uh, kitchen or home, unless there's a very sharp curved fire-poker out there somewhere. The lacerations are messy but the skin is unstressed in a way that suggests the initial puncture was sharp and the rest was torn open easily," Conrad supplied, making a short pawing motion in the air. "Fits the pattern for something with sharp tip and a blunt shaft. They almost look like… heh, claw-marks. Not really. But almost."

Conrad Achenleck intensely disliked the sensation of reaching into the dark hole in front of him — namely, the tall man's unflinching gaze — and expecting to find something that would make him stop, like a wall or something squelchy and disgusting. But no: he just kept inching deeper and deeper, feeling like he was already up to his shoulder, and if something were to bite him now, it would bite his whole arm off. Worse, if he fell through, he wasn't going to end up in Wonderland.

The young coroner had no idea what kind of world this man lived in, if he seemed to passively agree with all of his wild suggestions then continue looking on expectantly.

"Th-that's all I can gather so far." He bit his lip and hesitated just long enough to convince himself of his good conscience before passing the tall man a photocopy of the collage of examination photos he'd taken. Just the best… or, er, worst of the lacerations along James Maleck's back. "I hope it… helps."

_In whatever the hell you're doing which will stay far outside of my door_, he wanted to add, but the Detective took them with a nod so grateful and contained that Conrad just nodded back, suddenly rubbing his clean examination gloves over each other nervously.

"Thank you. This will give us a better idea of what we're dealing with. You might have just single-handedly solved our case," the other man said sincerely, then flashed him a tired smile. "I hope I don't see you again anytime soon."

"Wouldn't be too much to ask," Conrad agreed, glancing up at the ever-wakeful security cameras as the tall man tipped his fedora. He exhaled uneasily. "I'm starting to sigh in relief when I get gunshot wounds and, uh, piano-wire lacerations."

The man smiled like _oh, he knew_ except that was _creepy_ and Conrad wished that _no one_ knew, especially himself. But his visitor was on his way out the next moment, so Conrad just tugged at his scrubs and jostled his smock and listened for the click of the examination room door, then turned back to the other man who required his attention: James Maleck, whose port-mortem pin-ups he'd just passed off to the Detective.

A little illegal, yes, but James was none the wiser and he had no family to raise protest. He might even appreciate the attempt to find his real killer and bring a halt to this stupid hunt for a serial killer who was either propping his feet up on a Maui beach or dead. The feds really did have a talent for making convincing cover stories, but certain coroners with internet access could easily find out a serial killer's MO and James Maleck was not the work of Raphael Price, the accused. The Detective had surely seen through it, too, or freaky wounds were just his business.

Dr. Achenleck didn't quite know why he continued giving the older man so much information, especially when his job could be on the line for breathing a word of the stranger injuries he'd seen. There was just something so calm about the man. He wasn't one for reading people, as he had a slight social allergy to them, but he knew he could trust the Detective.

That was his title, now: the Detective. Like the Doctor. He had a name, yes, but he had only used it once with a considerable amount of reluctance, and it seemed so ill-fitting that it immediately went under the rug. Whatever he asked for, no matter how much Conrad initially scoffed and waxed poetic about red tape, the Detective eventually got.

There was absolutely no way to explain the sorts of bodies Conrad was getting now, anyways, and he wasn't going to take the lead officer's blathering as any sort of excuse. No one could see that kind of carnage and sleep well at night and he was scalpel-deep in it. He honestly wanted to know what was going on if he was going to feel safe walking the streets at night and the Detective seemed like the best way to do that.

He had met the man four weeks ago when something was going terribly wrong with his condo. Well, place itself was functioning well enough if you didn't count the overturned furniture, but roosting at the center of the maelstrom was a little purple bat-thing that _talked_. No, not talked, but bitched. Constantly. He was dumb enough to mention this oddity when reporting the disturbance in various tones of hysteria (higher depending on how many times it had managed to bloody his shoulders and rip his best shirts). Needless to say, no pest control would believe him, much less his land-lady, and the one de-batter that did come ran out screaming five minutes later with a gash across his ass.

At the end of his mental rope and bleeding from most of his face, Conrad had called some sort of… paranormal investigation squad. Modern day ghost-busters, and _yes_ he realized how stupid it sounded, but there had been a bat in his living room who nearly bit his nose off and then called him a pussy directly afterwards. After the call, he sat wringing his hands in the kitchen, telling himself he wasn't hiding, until the doorbell rang. He crept through the living room where the bat was sleeping on his favorite lamp and opened the door with shaking, red-smeared hands.

"Mr. Cross?" he whispered desperately, looking up at the very tall, thin man sporting an orange sharp-collared button-down that practically glowed. A black tie and a gun-strap cut through the middle of it and his gloves were worn but made of real kid leather. Partially shaven and fully handsome, the Detective looked slightly amused to find the younger man crouching in his own doorway.

"Actually… no. I'm his assistant."

That was all in the way of a name Conrad got out of him before he gave the coroner a deferential, business-like nod.

"This is Hanna, Mr. Achenleck. He'll be helping you with your vampire problem."

The man he would know as the Detective stepped aside and a dead little boy walked into his doorway, staring endlessly with electric blue eyes underneath a swath of caution-tape-orange hair. There was a sharpie in his faintly green fist.

"You know you've got something on your face?" came the curious, powder-soft voice, making Conrad Achenleck's jaw drop something vicious — _before_ he exploded at the kid for stating the obvious and thinking he was a fucking idiot and of course there was blood on his face did they have any idea what he'd been dealing with so get the hell in here, what were they waiting for?

They got the evil little creature out, after a few suspicious dealings with a hammer and some squiggles on his carpet that he was told would wash out with warm water. The quiet little boy — because he wasn't dead, just quiet, what a ridiculous thought – even put a protective rune on the back of his door so she (she? Well, it _was_ purple) couldn't come back immediately. If she tried, apparently she would get a hell of a stomachache.

The word vampire was used liberally in any and all explanations, but Conrad preferred to ignore the very possibility as long as it meant this condo was his own again — and, being a respectable upper-middle-class American, he was very, very good at ignoring things.

That calamity said and done, Conrad was thrown into the long and arduous task of piecing his very trendy apartment back together. He dearly hoped that was going to be his last encounter with anything of the supernatural sort and was almost thrilled to immerse himself in the mundane world of price shopping for suitably mod furniture. No more bats, no more strange young men who smelled like dust and didn't breathe.

The kid's assistant _had_ been handsome, but if he dealt with sassy bats all the time, Conrad flat-out wasn't interested. His décor couldn't take much more of this, and lovers came and went but furniture _stayed_.

The next week, as if some destiny time-bomb had been set off, strange bodies started showing up at the city morgue where Conrad worked as the assistant coroner. Some were discovered in the strangest of places, all were disfigured. There was general coughing and hand-waving and a distinct air of nervousness among the higher-ups, but Conrad couldn't let any of the exotic and truly awful deaths go without an explanation, even if it was a quiet one. So he found the card the man had left him with _("We aren't pest control, but in case your place becomes a roost again, we'll be around to help")_ and had a very awkward one-am conversation with him, all focused around _not_ admitting that there were other night-time bogies out there who might be doing horrible shit to people.

Conrad had never experienced anything more supernatural than a hokey three-card-trick magician at his third birthday party. This was plainly ridiculous and he was incredibly ill-equipped to deal with it even as he was being dragged in kicking and screaming. He was the nervous sort, introverted and defensively sarcastic and cowardly to a fault. If there was some sort of demon movement going on in the streets of their city, the gods had better get the memo and choose another key-master, Conrad thought grimly, snapping his gloves up his wrist.

The assistant coroner looked at the white body laid out flat on the table, prone and stiff. James Maleck, twenty-seven. Average height, slightly overweight, blond. Skin flayed. Spine exposed. Slices grooved deep into the bloodless flesh. Both eyes torn out.

Who, or what, could have done this? The textures alone were transfixing.

Finding himself incapable of looking away, Conrad finally gave into his most famous semi-nasty niggling urge and peeled off his gloves, feeling the cool air of the examination room hit the sweaty places between his fingers. The place was practically a walk-in freezer and the relentless fluorescent lighting and cobalt tiling only completed the look. Three examination tables stood like aluminum lunch trolleys, attended by a generous spread of surgical instruments. He clenched his hands and stretched a little, trying to banish the imagined clotted post-mortem grime hanging near them.

Conrad got his pen and his sketchbook from his bag and leaned back on the far counter, staring a little longer at the mutilations and starting out with a jagged line for the spine. He was just recently trying a new technique where he didn't take his pen off the paper and rarely looked down: he just felt the lines and forms of the object. Each vertebrae was damaged, chunky and ruined, like white mountains in the desert of the man's broken back.

Sometimes he thought the only thing that had gotten him through medical school was his fascination with the human body. Knowing every avenue of sinew was his greatest achievement, and that wasn't a word he used very often. The idea of learning what instruments could break the body's earthy gorgeous symmetry, and in what ways, had been his motivation for becoming a coroner. It was creepy, yes, but he liked to work nights and was generally a solitary person, and nothing said 'weren't you on your way out?' like a room full of dead people on ice.

He'd begun to think of them as his friends, or at least little guardian angels against office small talk.

"In'nerruptin' yer jack-off time, am I?"

Conrad yelled, failing to toss his sketchbook into the air only through the grace of God and sweaty fingers. He whirled and scrambled backwards, knocking a container of swabs over and sending them cascading over the floor and his open bag. The invader looked at him like he'd already disappointed him, which was a look oddly condescending and superior for an unwashed stick of a man with a prickly face and a curled lip and the tackiest fur-lined coat he had ever—Conrad gasped, blood instantly dropping to his gut.

That face. That coat, with the fur. Those _teeth_.

It was the vampire. From the alley. With the Detective.

They'd met at a bar a few days ago. Conrad had been half-drunk already, thought he'd _seen_ something in the garden near his condo and didn't know who else to talk to. It was pathetic, but his nerves were worse than normal and this was the kind of shit that would get a therapist to _send you in_. He described it as best he could, still not used to being brutally and insanely honest. After nodding a few times, Marc assured him that what he'd seen wasn't a threat — gnomes ate grubs and voles, the garden must be full of them – and he left the bar shortly after, saying he had to get back to home.

The Detective had only been gone two minutes when Conrad sat up ramrod-straight, realizing he had forgotten to tell him about something he'd found in a new body. A _stone_, a completely white river stone found in a man's throat when the cause of death was unknown, was that normal? No. So he went out after him. He only made it half a street before he heard something down an alley — a kind of scrape, like vans against an alley floor and a guttural and squeezed _oomf _— and turned.

"_Mr. Raney?"_

_He crept in further, glancing nervously up at the rough brick walls, then instantly drew back and froze._

"_Oh, Christ."_

"_I'm fine, Dr. Achenleck."_

"Please don't, uh. Don't call me doctor," he said faintly, staring at the Detective and the ragged man holding him up against the wall. He was wearing some kind of long, thin coat that had once been white, bursting with matted fur at the throat and cuffs. He turned and his narrowed eyes flashed white like a cat's in the sudden glare from passing headlights. A low growl, prickly and sourceless, rippled through the narrow black alley.

"_What I mean is, I think you should leave," the Detective said over the gnarled fist strangling his tie, voice forcibly, aggressively calm. His pretty almond eyes flickered up to the lips curled inches from his ear. "My friend has just informed me he hasn't eaten in a while and I think that pertains to you."_

_The 'man' turned his way again and grinned in what seemed like a disturbingly showy manner, until Conrad realized there were two ivory fangs jutting over his bottom lip._

"_Yeah. Piss off, puppy," he growled, messy cockney-aussie-something accent grinding against Conrad's red ears. "Or I'll have words for 'im and teeth fer you." _

_A vampire. A fucking vampire. His heart stopped for a full two beats._

"_Okay," he heard himself whisper, faint as the water trickling out of a drain further down in the gritty blackness. He stepped back, foot scraping against wet concrete. "Okay."_

Then he ran all the way home. It was only two blocks and, yes, score one for being brave. He was all too ready to take to heel and run and let that man — thing – _vampire _— kill the Detective but he figured from the stony look in the man's eye that he had at least seen its type before. Knew how to kill it.

Obviously it hadn't needed killing, or the killing didn't go as planned. One was good, one was bad, especially if the thing was in his office and wanting to chat.

Unable to help from sagging against the counter, Conrad took one deep, horrified breath, then another, then clutched his sketchbook against his pounding heart as if to smother it.

"How the — how the _fuck_ did you get in?" he burst out, slamming his fist down on the table.

"Magic," the vampire answered immediately and grinned, flashing enormously long fangs set in his jumbled teeth.

Conrad knew nothing about vampires (and regretted the reality that made him _learn_), but weren't they supposed to be clean and chilly and beautiful and have perfect cat-fangs? This one was cockeyed and too skinny, bordering on emaciated. His coat and skin were matted with general filth and his fangs looked more like one would think belonged to a wild wolf: too narrow and jumbled-up. The sight of it all distracted Conrad enough that the strange vampire was able to snatch his sketchbook right out of his hand, ignoring Conrad's stunned and lame "H-hey!" as he swiped back for it. The invader squinted at it, tilting it to another angle in the barely-buzzing fluorescents.

"I could see yer boner from the surveillance system. You really get off on this shit, doncha."

It was a statement, not a question, and Conrad immediately felt himself getting offended and high-strung, not even acknowledging the terrifying possibility that the creature really might have had access to the security system.

"It's beautiful," he blurted out, thinking it wasn't the stupidest thing to say. He gulped, then looked at his pen-scratch drawing of vertebrae tumbling messily down the page and felt the blood rise to his face. No one had ever caught him in the awkward act of sketching his patients and it showed, even though he had nothing to prove to this freak.

Lucky that defensive ire was keeping him from pissing himself.

"Inspiring, at the least."

"Yeah," the vampire humfed and tossed the sketchbook aside like it was a used condom, making Conrad fume instantly and scramble for it. The invader turned and picked at his ugly teeth, turning over a nearby scalpel with his other hand. "Inspirin' to yer dick."

"What are – do you need something?" the young coroner demanded icily, really quite fucking impressed with how he was handling this. He gathered his sketchbook and stowed it underneath his bag, safely away from the stranger's dirty hands. He didn't even want to know the thing's name, he just wanted him out.

Out before he could eat him alive. Right.

"Yeah, I do. You hang out with that guy. That guy with the hat, who thinks he's hot shit."

The vampire reached into a pocket of his fur-trimmed coat, which made Conrad tense and get ready to bolt, but he only pulled out a pack of cigarettes and plucked one out, dangling it between his long fingers.

"Marc Raney," Conrad said slowly, strangely mesmerized by the way he lit it up and took a drag that made his emaciated chest fill out, ribs straining at the coat. No smoking allowed in the morgue, but could vampires really…?

"Yeah, him. You see the zombie?" he asked, like Conrad shouldn't be staring at him like he was insane. The vampire put his hand out and chopped it about shoulder-level, smoke leaking out of the corner of his mouth. "Lil' kid zombie, bout yay high. Glasses, stitches all over. No pulse."

"He's not a _zombie_," Conrad said immediately, tone almost scandalized.

"He's fuckin' _dead_ and he's walkin' around," the vampire snorted violently, then shook his head with a disbelieving growl. "Naw, he's fuckin _green_ and he blinks every three years. There's naiveté then there's plain fuckin' idiocy, which is yer excuse?"

Conrad shut up, suddenly very absorbed in his knotted up hands. Well, yes, he couldn't deny all of that, but what about the other signs? The young man named Hanna had walked into his condo with the Detective and he didn't seem to be attached to his assistant's elbow, gnawing away. Then again, maybe he hadn't been hungry. Maybe the Detective had fed him earlier.

A jitter went up his spine at the thought, especially when he was in a room with another one of those eats-humans variety of impossible creatures. God, how had he never known that the night was this dangerous?

"But zombies are… they… eat flesh, don't they? And drool," he added hopefully, wilting when the vampire rolled his eyes in the most scathing manner possible and flicked his barely-smoked cigarette into a tool tray.

"Christ, why'm I even botherin'," he growled in disgust, and gave Conrad a look that accused the coroner of being the science fiction addict he was, using rainy days as an excuse to stay in and watch bad sci-fi channel movies. Conrad almost turned red, brow knitting.

Nothing to prove to this freak, nothing to prove.

"Why are you so concerned about some… _zombie_?"

"Knew 'im before he was murdered," the vampire answered shortly, hands going into his filthy coat pockets. "Wanna find out who did it."

"Why?"

"So's I can rip their throat out, y'stupid nosy fag," he snarled softly. A purely animal ripple went through his skinny frame, his fangs glinting in a way that made Conrad's blood run cold and said _fuck fascination, get this thing out of here_.

"Talk… talk to the Detective. He knows more than I do," he murmured, shoulders inching upwards. He tried not to let his utterly paralyzing nervousness show but he failed miserably: the step backwards and the clattering impact into a tool tray didn't help.

"Already talked to 'im. You saw how that went."

"Maybe if you didn't make a habit of stalking people and scaring the shit out of them before you tried to strike up a conversation, things would work out better for you," Conrad suggested acidly, hands out like _no shit Sherlock_.

The vampire's expression clearly said he thought that was the stupidest bit of advice he'd ever heard. That was alright — Conrad was used to being disregarded — but the coroner nearly gulped aloud when the vampire's scowl abruptly slid into something far more indulgent and lecherous. He turned around and half-propped himself on the counter, hips jutting out in a lazy, cockeyed way that Conrad told himself was not at _all_ come-hithery.

"Maybe I like talkin' t'you more," he purred, tilting those absolutely-not-inviting hips. He leaned back on the counter, fur collar sagging luxuriously around his needle-sharp shoulders. The lines in his throat stood out, deep and starved. "Maybe I'm in the mood fer a little distraction. Yer an artist. You wanna show me yer… etchins?"

"You've already seen them!" Conrad bit out, derision and hysteria growing neck and neck. "And _mocked_ them."

"Well good, 'cos I ain't in'nerested. Hate artfags."

Conrad blinked violently, unable to do much else. The vampire looked around the hyper-clean room curtly, sniffing in a way that was incredibly dog-like, then shook his head. He harrumphed.

"Damn. Thing about morgues… stay here too long, they always get me hard."

Oh god. Oh god. Ohgodohgodohgod.

And then Conrad _snorted_.

"W-was that a rigor mortis joke?" he asked (_prayed_) faintly. The vampire smiled.

"Floors me again 'n again. You humans're too fuckin' easy. You think just 'cos somethin's got a sense'a humor, that means it doesn't wanna rip you apart," he chuckled, wandering a few steps closer with an easy coat-swinging swagger. "And here selkies are some'a the funniest bitches I know. Lucky fer you, puppy, I ain't in a rippin' mood."

He let his coat fall off his shoulders, where it rumpled onto the tile floor. Suddenly he was close, too close, but Conrad was stunned by the body heat he _didn't_ feel coming off of the man. The pure aura of him — the weight and dry strength hiding in his cool body, his stringy bare arms laced with so many paper-thin cuts — hit him and plugged his mouth. Conrad's back hit the metal table, stopping him cold. The young coroner's breath caught at the vampire's slow, steady approach and the curious, intelligent intent in his wine-red eyes.

The creature's hand touched his first, too-long spindly fingers brushing over the back of his knuckles. Conrad grabbed for them, needing to feel just how dead they were so he could gain the revulsion necessary to strike out, but it was just cold. Cold and almost delicate, those hands were. Callused.

Then the vampire smiled again, just a roguish jerk of his thin mouth, and bent down and — _kissing_? They were kissing, now?

Where was the biting, the messy death? …Okay, well, _there_ was the biting. Ooh.

The vampire pressed in, twisting in a way that brought their chins scraping together and gave Conrad a full, rather unfortunate blast of his secret kink: stubble. It was firm and kind of really _awesome _and then he parted Conrad's numb lips and nipped at the tip of his tongue, minding his fangs.

Down below, the vampire's hand dug into his hip and pushed in a way that made Conrad half-pant into his mouth, eyes shutting. He hadn't been kissed in months. Kissing was good. The man's lips were cool and almost refreshing, alien and flexible and… sexy?

_No_. _Fuck no_, his brain screeched at him, hysterically banging its food-tin against the bars of the prison this monster had locked it in. Conrad roused, grimacing into the kiss but unable to do much else.

No, this wasn't him. He didn't kiss men he'd barely met before, much less scary skeezy dead men when he was working three feet away from _more_ dead men — at least Mr. Maleck was _washed _– but there was something about the fascination and fear that made him feel like a computer with a fifteen second lag-time. He could see it happening he just couldn't _do_ anything about it. His plain disbelief was keeping him from acting: _who_ broke into a morgue at three a.m. and asked about zombies and then kissed you, and got you to go along with it all?

He would learn the term 'glamour' — fancy speak for low-scale vampire hypnosis — later. At last, the vampire broke away and, thank god, there was air. Conrad sucked it in greedily and ducked his head, tingling from head to toe.

"C-christ," he stuttered. He licked his lips and warmed them with the back of his hand, instinctively blocking the vampire from more. He looked up, eyes wide behind his square glasses. "You're so cold."

"Haven't had a bite inna while," he purred, then leaned in close and nodded behind them, to James Maleck still lying prone on the table. "S'it like makin' out with one'a yer buddies?"

It took Conrad a minute before he realized the vampire meant making out with _James Maleck, the dead man he had just cut open two hours ago_. He threw up his hands, stopping just short of shoving the bastard and his sick assumptions away.

"No! I — god, I'm not a —" His voice went so high he choked, face reddening. The vampire looked at him like he either didn't know the word or was too afraid to say it because it was true, so Conrad grit out, "I'm not a fucking _necrophiliac_."

"Your loss." The vampire's eyes glinted evilly. "Sommuv us do a lot more than lie there and rot."

God, he was having trouble getting his breath. Which didn't help, because the vampire was leaning forward again like he'd like to suck it clean out of his body, too close. Too fucking close, and then Conrad's hand was on the vampire's shoulder, stopping him.

"What's your name?" he forced out, needing to stop this _train-wreck_. When the vampire froze and stared at him, Conrad stuttered, "You people do have, uh, names, don't you?"

"Luce," he said after a moment, in one disgruntled growl.

"As in, Lucifer?" Conrad nearly gagged.

"Naw, as in _Luce_, what my mum said when I popped out." When Conrad looked like he didn't believe it, the vampire grimaced. "Christ, you are the type that gets more annoyin the more they talk."

"_Well_," he said angrily, thinking up a really good comeback but still mostly stuck on the whole half-making-out-with-a-vampire thing. Unfazed, Luce picked up the slack with an impatient jerk of his head.

"Aright, mind shuttin' up, then? I hate talkin' while I eat."

Then he bent over again, just like that, except it wasn't to his face it was to his neck and—

"What the _hell_!"

Conrad reached back and grabbed the first thing his hand fell on, then slashed it across his front as hard and viciously as he could. He felt it hit — felt it catch and cut — and Luce the vampire jerked back, one skinny hand clawed around the dark streak on his sinewy forearm.

It had been a scalpel. Lucky. Conrad's entire body was flooded with relief, but then he heard the hiss.

It wasn't the right kind of hiss: the 'ow fuck aw man I'm gonna kill you' kind of hiss, which he supposed wouldn't have been good anyways. It was the hiss he had heard from men who liked having their ears bitten who subsequently had their ears bitten. It was a 'the spot' hiss, and Luce's curly, indulgent grin left nothing to the imagination on that.

The half-ecstatic tenseness in the vampire's face didn't dissolve when he downright fucking _leered_ at Conrad and bent over and drew his tongue across the cut. The blood, somehow blacker than normal, slipped off the edge of his skinny arm and fell onto the floor, splattering. It was sort of beautiful.

Sort of. Way more terrifying, though. Way, way more fucking terrifying.

"Like a man who knows how ta handle his instruments," Luce murmured, voice rough with something far more dangerous than anger. Conrad quivered in his scrubs, spine liquefied. The vampire surveyed the nearest instrument table like the shiny bits and bobs and pokers were toys. Sex toys.

"Jesus Christ, _what are you_?" Conrad demanded hoarsely, horrified.

"Yer en'nertainment fer the night," Luce answered, wiping the rest of the blood away like it was nothing. Looking at it, there wasn't a hint that his arm had been cut at all. He straightened and grinned cockily. "C'mon. Just one bite. Feels good. Promise."

"You – you stay away."

Conrad's voice came out low and desperate as he reached backwards again, frantically glancing over his shoulder and then scrabbling for the bone-saw he'd left there, sitting on the tray and still glistening with James Maleck's blood. He grabbed it and scrambled behind the nearest examination table and jerked around, voice going high as he heaved the saw up like an automatic shotgun, heart pounding frantically.

"I said you fucking stay _away_ from me!"

He pinned Luce right on the other side of the madly-shaking saw, like he was keeping the twisted creature there, safely across the room with a table between them. But then there was some kind of tight-chested _swoosh_ like the air had been sucked out of the place right behind him and replaced with something far more solid.

The end of the saw was suddenly empty and Conrad gasped so hard it hurt when stick-thin fingers curled around his shoulders.

"Don't wave somethin' that big around if y'ain't gonna use it, puppy. I jus' hate bein' teased."

He whirled around and Luce pinned him to the nearest examination table. He gasped as the saw was ripped out of his hand and flung across the room, the vampire's devious wolf-face thrust in his, fangs wet and peeking past his lips.

"C'mon, Dr. Achenleck. Jus' wanna take a sample," he said low and nice, like he was afraid Conrad would run away and hide behind his patient and throw shit at him to try and make him leave and that would just be _annoying _— and what the hell, his name?

"How do you know my name?" Conrad rasped, knowing somewhere in him that if vampires could move that fast, there was no use even struggling. He was going to die here and join James Maleck in the host of supernatural deaths and the Detective would just shake his head and say _what a loss_. He went quiet-shivery-still, unable to breathe when Luce scratched his clawed fingers slowly down his back.

"Same way I know you'll like this," the vampire whispered into his neck, brushing the collar to his scrubs aside. He bent enough so that Conrad could feel his almost-cool breath in the soft of his throat, which was pulsing rapidly. Luce stopped just as his lips hit skin, making Conrad stiffen and breathe _in-in-in_.

"And you got a fuckin' name tag. Silly lil' faggot."

Like a crack on the back of his head, Conrad felt an off-color burst of something too embarrassed to be exasperation, but before it could register, the vampire bit into him. The crisp noise was too like cutting into an apple and the pain was so sharp it made his throat close up. The young doctor went stiff as a board against the examination table, crying out and clinging to the vampire's arms. Luce muscled him down before he could struggle, skinny limbs strong as steel girders. The taller man forced Conrad against his emaciated chest and sucked as hard as he could and, with that first movement, some kind of burning pleasure sparked in the young man's veins.

His second noise was softer, more startled, and the third and fourth blended together into some kind of vaguely hopeless keen as the vampire drew from his neck rhythmically, winding his body tighter and tighter. Conrad's hands found grip on the back of the creature's black shirt, clenching and twitching with every suck. He felt the fierce pull change his pulse, _make_ his pulse and sculpt it into something controlled by the creature's warming mouth on his neck.

A little blood dribbled down his throat, slipping under his collar; Luce's soft tongue chased it with a murmured, hazy _fuck_, then he was drinking again, gentler and slower, lips toying with his throat. The vampire's effusive pleasure bled into his victim through the vibrating wet patch on his skin, making Conrad eyes close in something close to bliss. He phased out of his morgue and out of his skin and went somewhere completely different, where a deep-drum heart-beat ruled all.

He clung to the vampire's bony shoulders with the last of his strength as he felt it end. He grit his teeth, arching in the demon's arms – the last draws on his heavy blood felt like the last convulsive throes of sex, that moment when you don't know whether you're going to die or come. When the vampire drew away, Conrad's head dropped back instantly, a faint moan escaping his lips. The tiles blurred in his vision, water gathering at the edges of his fluttering eyes. Entangled, they slumped over the counter for a moment in the silent morgue, breathing hard.

"Heh. Pansy," Luce snickered when he found his non-breath, licking his lips. "Fuck, I needed that. Thanks fer volunteerin'. And you got low blood sugar, by the way. Might wanna do somethin' about that 'fore you, eh, pass out."

The vampire loosening his arms didn't help the process of getting back on his feet — or maybe Luce really was just that much of a dick.

Conrad hit the floor and didn't even feel the impact: it was like his ribs had been turned into some sort of impact-dampening shield. Or he was already dead.

Even dead, the cool tiles were a godsend. His body tingled madly, drowning in that relieved, hollowed-out feeling that happened just after vomiting up something really awful. He just focused on breathing, breathing, staying there on the tile which seemed to be slipping out from beneath him piece by piece.

He was going to live. Was he going to live?

"Aw, quitcher whimperin'. You'll live."

Conrad groaned and looked up, greeted by Luce's ugly mug right above him as the vampire crouched next to him.

"And don't get any feathers up yer ass about bein' turned, either. Yer safe on that too. I pulled out," Luce informed him with a singularly nasty helpfulness, baring his awful jagged teeth in another grin and _slapping his ass_. Conrad just groaned and rolled over, realizing he'd just lost quite a lot of blood and that was _it_. He wasn't going to die, he was just going to wake up on the floor several hours from now with the knowledge that a creature of the night had _fed_ from him. And then slapped his ass.

"F-fuck you," he whispered against the floor, stomach clenching with the effort.

"Naw, honey, not tonight. M'tired," he simpered back, then stood and gave him a nudge of his foot. Conrad oofed as if he'd been struck with a baseball bat and the vampire rolled his eyes. "Chris', what a whiny lil' fag. Give it a few hours and you'll be back up and runnin' marathons. If anyone gives you shit about it just say you fell nose-firs' inna the chloroform. Symptoms fit."

With that, the vampire walked away, coat swishing behind him and shoes tapping on the floor. Floating somewhere outside of his head, Conrad picked up on each of the noises with pristine accuracy until they all swarmed him and chased him back inside his body. He winced then stared blearily at the little space underneath the examination trolleys, waiting for his brain to dribble out of his ears. It was probably just his abused mind picking up on things, but the way the vampire used the terms made him wonder what the man was before he turned into an absurdly rude blood-sucking freak.

"Huh. This is nice."

Conrad looked up, neck creaking with the effort. The vampire, still _there_, was hefting up the saw he'd threatened him with: a gruesome bone-cutting specimen, old but sturdy and perfect for grisly-thick sternums. He turned it over with a grin; it flashed impressively in the stark morgue light. The look on his face was downright greedy and entirely too privileged.

"Think I'm gonna borrow it."

"That's… state property…" Conrad murmured, voice entirely too small in the cavernous room. His brow knitted with the difficulty of thinking. "They'll… have my ass…"

"Aw, doubt they'll be the first er the last," Luce said smugly, smacking his lips and slinging the saw over his shoulder. "Iffits any consolation, Connie, I'll be back fer what's left of it. An' take an ear t'what I said and eat a fuckin' doughnut before we knock boots again, eh? Maybe one'a them old fashioned cake ones, specially with the — "

Conrad never heard exactly what Luce liked on his (victim's) doughnuts, as he passed out that very moment and woke an hour later to a nasty blood-sugar hangover and a missing saw and a whole lot of camera footage to delete — and it was only Monday.

Fuck his life.


	2. Four AM

A/N: GNEE. You guys are—yay. Thank you so much for the response, I-I'm so glad. Because, like, this is going to be a freaking tome: this universe is so ripe its falling off the bone with almost terrifying quickness. And it's so much better if it's a tome that someone enjoys, because otherwise it was just going to rot on the internet shelf and be loved by no one but meeeeee.

God, Detective just kills me with his worrying and Hanna just kills me with his fail housekeeping. Poor baby just wants to help. Their love is so pure.

_Spoilers: none_

_Notes: Hanna is like {…} is at the moment: monotone and businesslike. It's wrong, I know it, and so does the Detective somewhere inside'a his confused lil brain. That'll change eventually, though, so hang onto this weird snippet of non-hyper 'medicated' Hanna. Also bad djinn research lollollolfail._

* * *

Four AM

* * *

The Detective tugged a few times at the keys to his apartment before rescuing them from the Lock That Ate Everything, dropping them in his pocket. He was relieved to be home. It had been a long night. A long Monday, especially since it was already Tuesday.

"Hanna," he called out into the dark apartment, hanging his coat on the rack. He blinked a few times, trying to ease the stinging in his dry, tired eyes. "I'm home."

"Gallahad."

The soft voice sounded like it was coming from the kitchen, which was unusual, and the clanging noise that followed verified it. Not knowing quite why he was wincing slightly, the older man walked toward his kitchen and when he flicked on the lights—Hanna didn't need any to see and it saved on electricity-his jaw dropped.

"Aw… Hanna."

"Since I have a lot of time to myself, I've been trying to find things I used to be good at when I was alive," Hanna said pensively into a pot, poking at the burnt and blackened pile at the bottom with an equally burnt and blackened spoon. He pulled it out and blinked curiously when his elbow landed in a dish of thick, gloppy something that most certainly had salmonella. "I don't think cooking was one of them."

Most of the pots were overturned, except for the one shuddering with water boiling out of control; there were at least three spatters on the wall and something was quickly encrusting his stove. The air was hot and smelled like baking powder and burnt rice; jars of both cinnamon and red ground pepper sat on the counter. Eleven of the twelve new eggs were scattered, gutted, around the sink.

The Detective closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.

"You tried—er." He bit his lip. Re-phrased. "You made me dinner."

Hanna floated over to the other end of the kitchen (about three feet), reached behind a hugely messy bowl and, with a surgeon's precision, pulled out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that was only slightly horribly cockeyed. It sagged to the left, bursting with two layers of peanut butter and one of jelly. He held it out, blue eyes glowing, and his partner chuckled and took it from him.

"Plan B and jelly," Hanna said in his odd half-whisper, looking up for approval or love or perhaps nothing at all.

"Was that a joke?" he asked hopefully over his shoulder, pulling out a chair.

"If you want it to be."

The Detective sat down and bit into the sandwich gratefully. Never mind that it was on sourdough bread, nor that he didn't really like peanut butter and jelly—he didn't like sweets—he was hungry and it was a gift. No matter how many Hanna gave him, he would always feel compelled to take them and feel _lucky_ about it.

The startlingly young zombie had a selflessness that perhaps came from needing nothing himself: with his needs met, who else had he to think about but his 'assistant'? The Detective often woke to find his clothes folded inside-out, his clean dishes re-cleaned and his kitchen plants thoroughly and lovingly over-watered. It was almost like he had a (slightly inept but well-meaning) house gnome or something, which Hanna actually informed him were real and quite oppressed.

Hanna was an interesting roommate, to say the least, and very cost-effective. He was always waiting cross-legged on the floor when he came home from work at the station and his perpetual dusty silence often drew the older man out in a way he hadn't expected. For instance, Hanna was the first one he'd told his secret.

The Detective had only been awake for a year. The people who found him in the depths of the forest were kind, a pack of hunters who reportedly refused to leave his unconscious form until he had been loaded into an ambulance and taken to the city. His pockets and his mind were empty, not even a paperclip to his name or a name with which to label paperclips; the city, sighing, took him on as best it could.

He couldn't remember anything. Yes, he'd been _given_ a name—Marc Raney-after a massive amount of fruitless therapy sessions and municipal processing, but he was sure it wasn't his. He avoided using it at most costs.

His secret was, he still believed he would find it. It seemed insane—until Hanna came along. Maybe it was the fact that Hanna couldn't remember anything either, or that he fell into his life in a dark alley, holding tight to a business card with a picture of him on it. The picture had him smiling professionally in a fedora, captured in color from a different life. There was text, but it had been scratched out.

The only thing it said—half-said, in peeling water-logged letters-was Detective. His title. His fragment. It was the closest thing to a name he had, delivered by a little dead boy at four am in the middle of January, who then passed out cold and had to be carried to his apartment.

"_What's your name?"_

_He ducked at the question. It was an awful one. He knew normal people needed words to _call_ things by and that's why he eventually surrendered up his label to the people he worked with and maybe some waiters, but it was always a loss. He always felt like a fake; would have preferred to stay 'hey you'. Then he looked down into his coffee and made a decision._

"_Tell you the truth, I don't know my name. I never have," he said quietly, watching the brown chase the cream around, swirling deeper and deeper into the cup. Hanna the zombie, still a blue-eyed stranger, cocked his head as though the math were all-too-simple._

"_Then I will call you everything," he said, voice incredibly clear for being so soft. "I'm sure we'll find yours eventually."_

Starting over at thirty was hard. The fact no one was looking for him was even harder. The business card proved that he had, in fact, existed and his grating urges to _solve_ things were actually quite natural, but where were the posters with his face on it, the loving family waiting and wringing their hands? Had they stopped after three months? Three years? When did he disappear, and was anyone still missing him?

Then there was the scar on his chest.

It wasn't so much a scar as a serpentine mutilation tacked with five cockeyed aluminum staples. Pieces of his chest were literally stretched over each other, yanked over his defined ribs and leaving him looking like he had been run through a taffy machine from hell. The skin was rubbery and he was afraid to touch it; he was almost never fully undressed, even when he'd lived alone. He didn't know where it came from, which should have maybe made it easier to bear, but just looking at it made him sick. Made him feel dark inside, he guessed.

The doctors who treated him didn't have an explanation for it, but all his vital-signs held out against various medical tests so they found no reason to remove the staples and look inside. Might have been dangerous. He should just be happy to have his good health.

"Hey. It's good," he said through a sticky mouthful of peanut butter, aiming to soothe Hanna's invisible nerves. It was probably a good deal of projection on his part, but he could tell that when the young zombie had been looking at him that long, he wanted something.

It was the right thing to say. Abruptly, the tips of Hanna's cupids-bow mouth twitched up and the Detective's answering smile was immediate and shiny with jelly.

"Hey." He put his sandwich down, a fond, mildly surprised expression stealing his face. Hanna looked back at him expectantly. "You smiled."

"Yes," the zombie agreed after a moment, simple and short. He cocked his head, as though mystified why he did it—or why it should matter. Was he really so detached from humanity? The thought pained his partner. Hanna functioned, yes, but was he really living? Or was that too much to ask from a boy who died in his early twenties and couldn't even say why it had happened?

"What did you find?" Hanna asked, suddenly at his elbow. The soft light from his eyes glinted in the Detective's periphery and he remembered where he'd come from.

He pushed the last bite of sandwich away on his plate, wiped his hands off and reached into his bag. He pulled out the bundle Dr. Achenleck had given him and carefully spread the pictures out on the table, then sat back. He hadn't had a chance to review them as closely as he felt he should have, but he paused to watch Hanna silently take them all in. Sometimes hours' worth of poring over materials could be solved by one pass of Hanna's scanner-blue eyes.

"Claw marks in sets of four. Bloodless body. Skin warped from heat. Looks like djinn," Hanna murmured, gangly greenish hands hovering above but not touching the photos. His long finger trailed through the air above one particularly nasty image of the victim's exposed spine. "Ifrit, maybe."

"Is it a djinn or an ifrit?" his partner asked slowly, as if afraid to interrupt the intense electrical storm of piecing-together Hanna was locked in.

"An ifrit is a certain kind of djinn," the zombie explained, eyes never straying from the evidence. He blinked, a rare occurrence. "Ifrit is fire-based. Marid is most powerful. They're known for being really mean and hanging out in abandoned buildings. Dirty places like dumps and ruins. Probably was living in that stalled housing project down on fifth. Unfinished is as good as abandoned to them."

"But, this…" The Detective picked up a snapshot that was caught at the bottom and looked at the brutal rips and tears for no more than a moment before tossing it down and sighing thickly into his hand. "What would have provoked this kind of attack?"

"Maybe James Maleck went wandering in its new home and it didn't want visitors," Hanna guessed, then looked hard at another photo, lingering on the sagging depression of James' closed lids. "But… did it rip his eyes out?"

Hearing that awful sentence in Hanna's faint, blank voice made it twice as awful, but the Detective scrounged for the back of the file and—yes, among the listed injuries, both of his eyes had been gouged out.

"Yes."

Hanna frowned—or did a Hanna frown. His lower lip protruded slightly, a veritable explosion of emotion.

"That's an insult or a curse. You only rip out an enemy's eyes if you never want them to find the light. Condemning them to hell, effectively."

The Detective had to remember to shut his mouth, and did so. Hanna had a tome of old, perversely diverse knowledge in his head. The older man couldn't fathom it, much less where he'd gathered it from, but trusted it implicitly. More and more he felt like a student in a world he hadn't even known existed, which was strange, owing as his teacher was a twenty-something year old boy.

"Djinn don't do that, normally. It either had to be really mad or really confident no one would care." Hanna's eyes flared slightly, making his partner look up immediately. The zombie's round face was as close to tense as it ever got. "Or… he was performing a spell."

Hanna and magic was something he'd learned not to ask about.

"Where does that get us?"

"I guess we go check out the housing project and try not to get killed," Hanna suggested, face blank again as quickly as if someone had shaken an etch-a-sketch. Then he shrugged. "Or you try not to get killed. I don't think that's a danger for me anymore."

"Let's play it safe, just in case," the Detective said tiredly, getting up with a little groan he hid in his collar. His back hurt. Bed called, but his want for something warm was louder than either his back or his bed.

"Okay."

The older man moved around the ruined kitchen as if picking through a demolition zone, wincing as he had to reach over the pot he would either have to bleach or toss in the fire. He was scarce on pots anyways, but this would make cooking macaroni even hard. He could feel Hanna's eyes on him as he made tea, but was used to it by now. The zombie rarely blinked and never slept. It took him a while to get used to that part.

It was strange to go to sleep with Hanna at his laptop screen, face illuminated aqua in a way that made him see, at least, what the boy had looked like when he was _alive_ and glued to a monitor, then wake up eight hours later to find him in the exact same position.

"_Level thirty-eight," he announced, looking up at his partner, who was still under the sheets and blinking vapidly. The Detective scrubbed at his eyes._

"_On what?"_

"_I'm a level thirty-eight night-elf."_

"_Oh," he said intelligently, reaching for his watch._

_He wasn't one for videogames. He wasn't even quite sure how Hanna was paying for that subscription, or if he was going to end up paying for it. Not that he minded. He lived cheaply and Hanna didn't eat: he could afford a little brain-food for a friend who needed nothing, as long as his own brains weren't at risk. _

"_How, uh… how long did that take you?"_

"_Seven hours and thirteen side-quests." Hanna's thumbs moved: twitchtwitchtwitch. It got him thinking. Worrying, really._

"… _What else do you do at night, Hanna?"_

"_Go walking."_

_The idea of Hanna's checkered vans on the chilly streets, scraping down and down and down into unmarked alleys (because of course he wouldn't be cautious enough to stick to under the streetlamps) unnerved the Detective instantly._

"_Where do you go?"_

"_Places."_

_He grit his teeth, tossing back the sheets and making the five-step trip to the bathroom. It was like dealing with a dodgy, snotty fourteen year old, except there was no malice in it and a legitimate chance that Hanna didn't remember. _

"_Just… be careful, okay?"_

"_What could happen?" Hanna asked the screen, forgetting to blink again._

What could happen, indeed, was something that had been worrying the Detective more and more lately, not just in terms of Hanna but the magic that had reanimated him. Was there ever a chance it could just… stop? Did he need some sort of refill? Would he just run down one day like a clockwork toy or would he actually start to rot? Should he be feeding him mothballs to keep him fresh?

"How was Dr. Achenleck?"

The Detective looked up and over his shoulder, frowning some. He blinked back his tiredness. Lost in his own head again. His memories were incredibly distracting for one who had as few as he did.

"Fine. A little unnerved. Understandable."

He hated to say it even in his own head, but it looked like the young coroner was going to be very useful to them for the next… however long his sanity lasted. The younger man, nervous and polite, looked like the type that either could show a surprising aptitude for bucking up and dealing once he realized his nightmare wasn't going to end anytime soon, or have a screaming mental breakdown. Still, they were lucky to have met him, he thought. Funny, how vampires could work in their favor.

Well, some vampires. Others, especially ones in fur coats who asked incomprehensible questions about his new partner, he had to be wary of. Very wary. He didn't even mention the encounter to Hanna, even if the night-creature seemed to know the young zombie and was pretty pissed about him partnering up with Hanna. It could all just be an act or something vitally connected to the boy's murder. Something to keep to himself until he learned more.

After all, it wasn't as if Hanna could help him figure out what it meant: they both knew the same amount about each other's lives or lack thereof. It was a thought both comforting and disturbing. Who knew there could be a friendship utterly without secrets? Well. Except for this one.

For a moment the only sound in the kitchen was his spoon hitting the side of the cup as he stirred in a little honey. Clinkclinkclink.

"I could have put on a coat, Barnaby. Maybe a mask."

It seemed random, distinctly at odds with his ever-wandering thought train, but then he looked back and Hanna's upturned face and non-expression said it all.

"I wanted to go with you."

"I know," he said guiltily, shoulders dropping as he walked back to the table.

Hanna was ready to go everywhere with him. He was his partner. He just didn't think it was such a good idea to bring a zombie everywhere. After that last incident with Hanna's stitch straining and almost snapping… hell, it still looked a little loose and that worried him.

"Everything I have sews back on," his partner said quietly.

"But you. You don't sew back to… you," he said dumbly, at a loss. What would happen if he were crushed? Incinerated? Would the dust just pile back up and solidify? Damnit, he didn't know the limits of reanimated people. He stared at Hanna, expecting some kind of response—some sort of visceral emotional _twitch_ to the idea of him losing what little life he had left-then sighed and shook his head, taking three deep gulps of his tea. "Never mind. I'll bring you on the next run."

Dr. Achenleck would just have to deal with him. Maybe it would push him a little more towards the 'buckling down and dealing' end of the spectrum and away from the 'running crying to the cops' end. Mostly, he didn't want Hanna stuck here alone. And it didn't have anything to do with what might happen to his kitchen while he was gone. Or, maybe… a little.

He bit back another sigh and looked to the kitchen, where a bowl was merrily drip-drip-dripping some kind of tar-like substance onto the floor.

"Think we can get a walk in before I turn in."

They walked at night so no one could see Hanna. Cause undue alarm. Plus it comforted him to be there when his partner could be out walking alone. He always felt the need to be beside Hanna when they went out. Just to protect him, even though the boy he'd seen in action hardly needed it. He was just so small and so cool and dry, like a book-pressed leaf. Made him seem like a puddle would be the end of him.

The Detective drained his cup and set it down next to the pictures, thinking he would leave them for Hanna to look over and then tidy up. Just so he wouldn't feel awkward asking for them if he wasn't done. He squinted towards the kitchen again, reluctance pooling in every inch of him.

"Let me just take care of—"

"I'll do it," Hanna said, putting out a hand. The Detective could just barely see the curve of a rune on his dry greenish palm. "It's my mess. And I have all night. You need sleep. Lots of it."

Lots of it wasn't an option. It was four am and he had to be at work at ten. And it was Monday, so he would have to deal. Hanna, inspired, went to the door and got his partner's huge trench-coat, struggling a little to get it off the high coat-rack due to his height. His holey vans creaked and squeaked with the effort and he skittered back, holding it out.

"Let's go."

The _please_ was unsaid but still present. He had learned to read Hanna well enough over the past two months and he was rewarded for his skill only every so often. The Detective smiled, shrugged on his coat and his hand landed on Hanna's head. His hair was a little dry but otherwise soft. He fluffed it.

The zombie looked up and gripped onto the side of his coat, fingers poking into the pocket, and they hit the streets at four am. Didn't find anything more alarming than a woman that seemed intent on luring both of them down an alley for unknown purposes, but it was calming floating from streetlight to streetlight atop the steady scrape of their shoes, with Hanna's hand half in his pocket, clinging there like a delicate dried moth.

In some ways, four am was his favorite time of day.


	3. House Call

A/N: I'll have you know that every chapter with Conrad and Luce is going to have some sort of horribly explicit canoodling in it. Why? Because I'm classy like that. Yeah, you can put the cucumber sandwiches over there, right next to the teapot full of hot sex.

If you stalk the Ygal Hanna community, the real version can be found there until I make an AFFnet version.

Conrad, little do you know you will spend the majority of your upcoming life screaming and flailing at some variety of sudden/awful shit pulled by Luce. If you would just stop SCREAMING, he would stop doing it, yeah? God, fft, where is his common sense.

Warnings: intense sexual content, language

Notes: Worth is a different kind of vamp, and can do a few things other bloodsuckers can't. Just a forewarning that doesn't apply here. O-otherwise um just… bring napkins.

* * *

House Call

* * *

Around three am, Conrad surfaced from a deep sleep and lay in the dark of his bedroom, warm and snug in his comforter. He rustled around for a moment, searching out cool bits in the sheets with his bare feet, then rolled over and looked up into the face of a vampire, its blood-red eyes caught in a bar of moonlight.

All breath died in his body as Luce drew back his lips and grinned.

"Boo."

Air punching into his lungs, Conrad yelled and struck out, kneeing up and flinging outwards. He scratched and panicked and _flailed_, then scrabbled flat to his headboard only to find the vampire on the floor five feet away, coat swinging around his feet as though hit by a wind. He hadn't even seen the fucker _move_.

His house, apparently, hadn't either. Where were the alarms? How had he not heard breaking glass? God, what fucking time was it? He clapped his hand to his forehead.

"Wh-what—_how_—"

"F'you keep askin' me how I get places, this is gonna get real boring," Luce drawled, looking horribly superior. He _winked_. "Toldja. _Magic_."

Then he fished in his pocket and tossed some wires on Conrad's bed: mangled, stripped wires that looked like they had been ripped out of something very important and expensive.

"And yer alarm system's shit."

"What the fuck! You-now I have to pay for that!" Conrad exploded when he found his voice, 'apoplectic' fast outpacing his 'mystified' rating.

"Lucky cutting up dead folk is pretty lucrative, eh," the vampire sneered, turning on his heel and bending to mess with Conrad's gorgeously organized bookshelf.

Five awful cavernous seconds passed, then ten, then one-hundred, and Conrad realized he couldn't get out of bed. It would have been like a challenge to the reality of the vampire flipping through Grey's Anatomy five feet away, so he just sat there, staring at the undead invader. Then he realized, in the quiet, that he finally had a chance to study the other man—er, thing. Without, er, being distracted by teeth or screaming.

His yellow-blond hair was chopped short, sticking up at odd angles and washing out his grey-white skin. He looked to be in his very-late twenties, with a high hair-line and a few extra years hiding in the lines around his perpetually grey-ringed eyes. Whether that number was three or one-hundred, Conrad had no idea. But the main point of interest was that Luce looked filthy, _felt_ filthy, but he didn't smell it. Or, rather, all the smells he'd accumulated were mainly mildewy and plain dirty, but there was no human rankness, no sweat or urine. He smelled almost earthy, but definitely with a hint of whiskey and dust and… rubbing alcohol?

"Why the hell are you here?" Conrad demanded, headache already budding. It shot out so naturally, he had a sinking feeling it was a phrase he was going to get very, very used to.

"Got any more word on the zombie?" Luce asked without looking up, abnormally sharp nails carding through the medical volume's hair-thin pages almost luxuriously.

_Fuck you're impatient for someone who's never going to die_, he almost said, but he shut up because he actually had heard word. Sort of. Or, he'd tried to _get_ word but all he'd found was silence.

_The young coroner suggested they meet for lunch that Friday, trying awfully hard to make it seem like he wasn't flirting with the Detective or coming on to him (because he honestly wasn't). He was fidgeting and swapping around iPhone aps at a tiny table when the Detective walked into the café… and right behind him walked a bundle of oversized coats and scarves. It toddled over uncertainly, like a top spinning its last spin, and fumbled kitten-like with a chair until the Detective pulled it out for him. The coat-pile fwumped down and stared across the table with big blue eyes._

"_Merro Boctor Akkinrek."_

_It was Hanna the zombie. He'd brought the zombie to lunch. It hit Conrad square between the eyes and thwanged there like an arrow of dumb, thwanging shock._

_Conrad still didn't know if he was lunch in Hanna's eyes, and so thoroughly embarrassed himself with a bumbling exchange that probably made the Detective think he was both an idiot and prejudiced against the undead._

_("You have… you know. You know? Haven't you?" "What?" "Fed him? Recently? At all?" "Oh, haha—uh, no." "_What_?" "I mean, no, as in he doesn't need to eat. He just sort of… keeps on going." "Oh thank god. I, uh, I mean…" "No, it's fine. Don't worry. I know this is weird." "Really fucking weird. Should we, uh, get him a glass of water or something?" "He hates water." "Oh. So. Uh. I'm really… yeah. Let's order.")_

_At least he didn't have to worry about the man being attracted to him. He was reliably making an ass out of himself at every opportunity. Still, since the awful moment passed and the Detective was still sitting there, Conrad took the chance to talk things over with him._

_He asked him about the wounds, what they thought they were. The older man looked at him with two completely mixed emotions—like it was simultaneously healthy that he was digging further into what was most obviously the cold, hard truth and he was wary that the other man wouldn't be able to handle said truth—then told him. Djinns. Ifrits. Murder. Abandoned buildings._

_One big beautiful bundle of Holy Fuck with a side of utter sincerity that almost made it more impossible to swallow._

_Hanna was very helpful once he removed the scarf from around his mouth (and wasn't he sweating to death in that pile? Oh. One sentence, two mistakes). Conrad, once again, learned a lot more than he ever needed to know about why he always felt creeped out around abandoned buildings. When that conversation ended, Conrad finally pushed his soup and soy-espresso aside and cleared his throat. Telling himself he was _not_ gathering information for seedy vampires, he was just curious._

"_So… You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but, um… where did you find him?" _

"_Hm?"_

"_Your, er…" Was it impolite to refer to someone by their state of unlife? "Your Hanna."_

"_He found me," he said with a faint smile, giving his partner a glance. "I was, uh… more than a little drunk and in the process of getting mugged. Hanna saved me, then passed out immediately afterwards. He was so cold, I thought he was dying… until I realized that had already happened. There wasn't anything I could do for him, but then again, nothing needed to be done."_

"_I don't remember anything," Hanna offered quietly, blue eyes shifting over to lock on the Detective. "I remember walking, then Imhotep getting beaten up."_

_Imhotep? Conrad thought, brow creasing, but the Detective was already continuing, one hand on Hanna's birdbone shoulder._

"_Yeah, that first spell just took a lot out of him. He didn't wake up for hours. He doesn't remember anything. How he died, or why. We found his old apartment and that helped, but in the process of our investigations we're trying to find out who he was. Little by little. We'll get there."_

_The Detective smiled again, only this time it was tinged with sadness and tiredness even as he sort-of-playfully tugged Hanna's striped knit hat low over his eyes._

"_I know the feeling of being lost and I wouldn't wish it on anybody, dead or alive."_

So, yes, he knew a good deal more about Hanna than he had previously—the most important to _him_ being that he wasn't the person-munching variety of undead—but Conrad didn't think it was his job to tell the vampire all that. Or rather, if he actually showed himself capable of gathering information, Luce would consider him an affirmed source and just keep coming back.

No, if he wanted to know about his zombie, he would have to go to the zombie. And be nicer to the Detective. Learn _social skills_. Maybe try cooperation instead of bullying. Big kid shit.

"Look. He's your friend."

_Or you say he is_, he thought suspiciously. He wasn't quite sure Luce was capable of having friends.

"Why don't you just… talk to him yourself?" he asked, trying not to let his exasperation show so early but _whoops_ there it went. He tossed his hands up, glaring and gesturing to the wires on his bed. "Why _break into my apartment_ when there's a chance I haven't even seen him?"

Worth turned away from his bookshelf, restlessness suddenly daggering out of his hunched back as he slapped the book closed.

"'Cos when I see 'im, I want the first words outta my mouth t'be about how the fucker that ripped him apart died screamin' under me," he growled into the dark bedroom, making a stiff shiver go up Conrad's spine. He reminded himself to breathe.

"How do you even know he was murdered?" Conrad asked. It was something he genuinely wanted to know, especially since the undead bastard was so insistent on it. "Isn't there a chance he could have just… _died_?"

"Not Hanna. Never Hanna. And besides, d'you have fuckin' eyes behind those froggle goggles? The kid's more stitches than skin!"

"Then… the Detective. He's looking for that man, too." God, it felt like he was repeating himself into an early grave.

"And he's gonna find him and _cuff_ him and put him inna some cell, and that's gonna get in the way'a me takin' his spine as a trophy." When Conrad looked up in something like surprise (or fear), Luce bared his teeth. "Oh there's an ongoin' investigation, princess. I'm doin' this on my own, I'm just checkin' every avenue and yer hat-man's one of 'em. When I find the guy, he dies. If hat-man gets in my way, things might go bad fer 'im. Jus' somethin' ya might wanna pass down the grapevine."

"Look, I haven't talked to the zombie." Which was sort of true. He never spoke directly to Hanna, just to the Detective _about_ Hanna. He was all about technicalities and white lies, especially if they emptied his bedroom. Which they had done... on more than one occasion, he thought reluctantly.

The vampire snorted and Conrad heard the '_what good are you'_ bite to it. He frowned.

"How do you even know Hanna?" he asked, using his name for the first time and quite conscious of the lack of zombie title. _Well, zombies are people too. Or they used to be._

"How is that any a yer business, faggot?" Luce snapped immediately, then huffed and put his hands in his pockets before Conrad could so much as defend himself. "Eh. I helped him out. Kept comin 'ta me, cryin' bout this and that. Couldn't find anything to get him off my back. Had to help him. Fer years, guess it's been."

With what, there was no extrapolation. His laundry? Moving? Killing someone? Luce just shook his head, in a sudden fever, voice low and rough.

"Christ, he was so noisy. So annoyin', so fuckin' annoyin'. Couldn't get him to sit still even when he was bleedin' out his ears. Like a cockroach, too. Just… kept comin' back." Luce sniffed disparagingly, glaring at the wall. "Only then, he didn't."

Conrad watched mutely, struck dumb by this strange glimpse of… _people-ness_. He had only ever seen Hanna as a spacey dead boy with a mildly responsive mouth, prone to almost-smiles and forty-five degree head-tilts. The idea of him, say, bouncing on the bed and refusing to shut up hit him oddly but was obviously causing the vampire a good deal of… something. Consternation? Pain? Nausea? The feat of reading Luce's expressions through the grime on his face was a staggering one indeed.

Grimacing, Conrad turned around to reach for his glasses and nearly groped Luce in the face, where he was suddenly-as-fuck reclining on the pillows next to him like some sort of model. Conrad didn't even have time to _breathe_ before the vampire's hand was scraping down his bare chest, tongue skimming the bottom of his own teeth.

"Sorry 'bout that. Water un'ner the bridge, yeah, so long's you remember all that threatenin' killin' talk and pass it hat-man's way."

"Uh," Conrad put in, feeling distinctly uncomfortable and maybe a little _terrified_, but Worth grinned it away, unnervingly perky.

"But I gotta warn you, damage's done. I'mma compulsive eater when I get depressed, and ice cream ain't 'zactly my thing."

"Oh jeez," Conrad eked out, staring at Luce staring at _him_. He tensed and freaked out and shoved the vampire away as roughly as he could, then rolled over and Worth was _on top_ of him with another tight barely-there swoosh, fangs bared.

"You liked it," he hissed. Quick and liquid, he bent down and licked behind his ear, making Conrad shudder and grip onto his stick-thin arms. "You just dunno how to ask for it."

His own ribs threatening to squeeze his heart into silence, Conrad wanted to scream 'chauvinist pig' but that didn't really fit now did it? But Luce managed it just fine and sent his nerves into a screaming race for land and that was his _breath_ on his _face_ and-

"You fucking rapist!"

He was getting handy at grabbing the nearest thing and swinging it in his direction, except it wasn't a lamp or anything truly worthwhile this time: the vampire ended up with a face full of goose-down pillow, which hit him with a undeniably fussy _PAFF_. The big white lump fell away and he just looked plain annoyed. Conrad realized with a little jitter that annoyed was probably more dangerous than horny as Luce blew a feather out of his face and took a breath.

"Awright, take two."

Conrad tensed and quailed underneath the creature, expecting something totally conniving and awful, but Luce just looked at him and said it again, in a slightly more informational tone of voice.

"Y'liked it."

"Wha—what? Is that supposed to make me _agree_? You _telling_ me that I liked it?" he gaped, yanking his covers up to his chin.

"It's s'posed ta jog the memory of the giant tent you were pitchin' when I chomped ya last time," Luce purred and gave him a devilish grin. Conrad opened his mouth, about to start with an expertly furious _fuck no you delusional_—and then promptly shut it and probably turned an impressive shade of carmine.

He—did—yeah. It did jog his memory, and what fell out—or rose up-was unfortunate. And embarrassing. He hardly noticed through all the fear and incredulity and rage and blood-loss, but… yeah. Worth chuckled, patting his cheek.

"S'alright, puppy, don't blush. Happens ta everyone.

"Everyone who gets bitten?" he said suspiciously, voice small.

"Naw, everyone around me. All the time." Another grin, self-assured and dickish. "So lemme at yer neck and maybe I won't leave you hangin' at the belt-line this time."

That quieted him up. Conrad was plainly terrified of the idea of being naked or at all intimate with this thing, but Luce's lidded eyes were fast winning him over. There was lechery there, yes, and a sharpness and a crudeness, but there was no danger. It radiated _fun_, if the words disgusting and gritty and shameless could also be held under such an umbrella-term.

"Hey, y'lived last time and I like the way you, eh, go down." The sex joke hit the young coroner square between the eyes, but he was already staring blankly, so it didn't matter. Luce gave him his version of a reassuring look, which wasn't very reassuring in the slightest. "Won't hurtcha. Just wanna take a little fer the trip home. Eh?"

The vampire's thin hand was firm at his thigh, sort of playing in the line right at his briefs at the top of his leg through his pants and then his cool nose in his neck and it felt not horrible. In fact, it felt kind of amazing. Kind of _really_ amazing especially when there was some sort-of kissing stuff happening back there. Conrad grit his teeth, trying to rein himself in. He could feel something else pushing at him, again, but wasn't magic-savvy enough to know what it was yet.

He told himself he wasn't helpless, but just the heavy presence of the vampire made him feel like a stuttering little girl, or maybe just a stuttering little _human_ in the face of something that held more power and years underneath its sallow skin than he could dream of.

That, and the dark fascination kept pulling him back. Luce was so close, vibrating with hunger. His would-be victim was almost channeling his bloodlust—it was in the fucking air—and Conrad was overcome by a want of the singular, wracking sensation he'd felt the first time he'd been bitten. He wasn't one for pain, but that had not been pain. Not exactly. Painful, yes; pleasurable, horribly. Transcendent, maybe.

It had been days and the memory had faded, leaving him grasping at shadows of exactly _what that was_ and like an itch in his stomach, he wanted to know. Wanted it badly enough to try again, if Luce wasn't going to hurt him.

It was official. He was fucking insane.

"Okay," he murmured, so soft he barely heard himself.

It was dumb, both too much and too little for agreeing to something of this startling caliber: and he wasn't liking the unchanging nature of Luce's expression, like he hadn't even been waiting for agreement. The gaunt man started to bend but Conrad put up a hand, swallowing heavily.

"But… don't get any blood on my sheets."

Luce grit his jagged teeth and rolled his eyes, heaving out a breath.

"Fuck, Connie. Y'really know how to ruin the moment."

Before he could respond, Luce snagged his wrists and pinned them above his head so quickly he didn't even see it, much less feel it until the cool wood was pressing into his knuckles. He swallowed audibly, cringing away instinctively when the vampire ducked down and maybe it was the hold he had on him but he hissed and shook like a leaf when Luce nipped at his neck, almost thrashing against him. An _oh god_ thrash, or even a _get off me_ thrash.

Conrad made a downright embarrassing noise of relief when Luce pulled back, lips curled in an impatient snarl.

"Yer mouth says yes but yer pulse says no, Connie. Make up yer fuckin' mind."

"Sorry. Sorry," he forced out, making himself stop shaking and generally freaking out. He took several shallow breaths. He had agreed to this. Wanted it. Sort of. "I just… sorry."

Apologizing to the vampire who was about to take his evening meal out of his neck. Right. He was way up there. Lots of self-respect tonight. Yep.

Making a surly hrm noise, Luce went straight back to business and this time Conrad made an embarrassing but acceptable noise when the vampire scraped his nose across his neck and licked it first, sucking and just letting the tips of his fangs prick at him. The younger man was wound tight as a spring in moments, wincing up at the dark ceiling as the anticipation nearly choked him.

Then Luce pried two fingers below his waist-line of his pajama pants and Conrad arched his hips so quickly it was pathetic. Oh god, he thought, _oh god_, because when he said he hadn't been kissed in months it meant that his last kiss was from this really awful guy from a online dating site that cornered him at his car and practically licked his chin and he hadn't been fucked for two years before that and god, this felt good, was just being touched by a dead guy supposed to feel this good?

Luce shifted forward and looked down the front of his (already very full) pants as if peeking down a well, then snickered just behind his ear, which of course made Conrad's mouth come open and a massive shiver plowed down his tender back.

"Keepin yer sister's panties warm fer her?"

"Shuddup," he grit out, hating that he chose tonight to wear the briefs, of _course_ he chose tonight to wear the briefs that his friends had gotten him as a joke. Truth be told, the little pudgy red bats didn't interfere with their comfort and Conrad really quite objected to anything going to waste if it was in the privacy of his own home and he was about to say so but then the vampire's hand didn't have any problem with the pudgy red bats either and it was _amazing._

Luce looked down and over and caught his lips and Conrad bit down hungrily, shoving his tongue past the older man's lips and sucking on the coolness he found there. The vamp drew back too soon with a 'horny humans do the darndest things' chuckle but before Conrad could do anything, Luce's mouth was back at his neck, tongue striping it once, twice. Circling.

"Just—do it," he breathed, trying not to moan it because this was not supposed to be sexy but god his gut was in knots and his legs were shaking.

"Now, don' rush me. This here's surgery," Luce said importantly, obviously treasuring his ability to remain cocky while working poor humans down to a pile of sex-deprived mush. He settled in and straddled Conrad's thigh, locking their legs into a French braid. "But you wouldn't have any 'sperience in that area, wouldja doc. All'a yer patients're already dead."

Chest bursting with concentrated seething _what the fuck_, Conrad opened his mouth and rolled his eyes-and the moment Worth bit into him, he realized his split-second offenses and non sequiturs weren't at all unplanned. They distracted the hell out of him, which made the bite easier to take without him tensed up, so there was less chance of tearing into his muscles and harming him. He knows his stuff, Conrad realized with undue shock, which was blasted away by sheer sensation when Luce drew hard on his neck and his vision went white.

Luce swallowed heavily, pressing him into the headboard almost brutally as Conrad gasped and hiked his legs up, toes tearing at the sheets, fingers twisting above Worth's left hand. Warmth flowed up and out of him. With the initial awe and fear gone from the first encounter, he couldn't keep from _scrambling_. Legs twitching, breath catching, spine curving; weren't they supposed to put you in a trance or something? Something to keep them calm, he thought, and then learned within moments that he preferred Luce's methods of restraint far more.

He cursed-moaned-whined, loud then softer as the shivers set in and sapped him of the will to move. Then he just panted until Luce pulled away, tongue running over his lips.

Almost immediately, the tongue was back at his wound, licking insistently. Conrad huffed and turned away, but Luce caught his chin and licked _hard_, making him groan unhappily.

"Tryin' t'save you the scars, faggot," he rasped, voice rough with sex. Just the sound of it made Conrad collapse back into his pillows, which were officially the softest things _ever_, feeling like he could drown in the after-haze of whatever had just happened. He was empty but satisfied and there was such a peace to be found in a void.

He drowsed there for either a few seconds or a few hours, wondering over what might have been the best orgasm of his life, and when Conrad opened his eyes and looked up, the vampire was grinning down at him, literally smacking his lips. The young coroner had the insanity to be somehow embarrassed, hand going to the gash in his neck. Then Luce lost whatever taste fascinated him, so he bit his own thumb and tasted again, eyes narrowing.

"Christ, you're... Fuck, what _is_ that?" he demanded, greyed tongue out. Suddenly Luce's red eyes widened and narrowed in the space of a moment, grin turning predatory. He smirked down at Conrad, victorious. "Peaches. You taste like fuckin' peaches."

Conrad stared at him blankly, then shut his eyes: a curtailed version of the palm-face-slap he wanted to do. He had been forced to eat canned peaches before going to bed: he had a rare sweet tooth and it was the only thing in the house. He was a coroner, after all, and had a nasty habit of over-inspecting the preservatives before he ate anything, but apparently these carried into the blood. And took the artificial flavorings with them. His awkward embarrassment doubled.

"No, I don't," he slurred, even as he knew he might.

Worth lifted his hand and licked it, tongue sliding between his fingers and making Conrad hiss, mortified, and duck his head.

"Two for two, puppy. Don't lie, it just makes me like ya more."

Face burning in embarrassment, Conrad realized that might be a very dangerous thing. Even more dangerous than annoyance or horniness combined, perhaps.

"Why are you harassing me?" he demanded when he was sure Luce was done with his _display_. No, wait, better question. "Why _me_?"

"'Cos you're fun to dick with. And y'taste good." Luce flashed another evil grin, saying over his shoulder (because suddenly he was off the bed), "and you know my lil zombie pal."

Conrad could only groan and admit to himself that it made just about as much sense as anything else that had been said that night. He decided now was a good time to roll over and pretend none of this ever happened, a process which Luce rudely interrupted by patting him on the ass. Again.

"Drink plenty'a water an get to bed early, peaches. Yer lookin a little pale." The voice went a little further away and Conrad heard what could have been his balcony doors click open, confirmed when cold air came blasting in. "In fact I just about choked on yer WBC count, so if you don't watch it, you'll come down with somethin' in the next week.

Shivering in the onslaught of wind, Conrad thought _hell, are all vampires this fucking helpful and can I also have my cholesterol levels,_ then he realized what the fuck the bastard had called him.

"Peaches-aw, are you… serious?"

An offense of that caliber demanded motion. And he was going to freeze to death if he didn't shut the fucking doors after him. Conrad staggered out of bed, yanking his pants up like a drunkard (and ignoring the wet, ignoring the wet, looking dignified with the wet). He tried to be no-nonsense but it just looked like he was glaring at the wall, eyes tiny and useless without their thick glasses.

"Hey, you aren't coming back. This _isn't_ going to be a…"

Fuck, what to call this? Serial harassment? A developing rape case? A prolonged series of meals in liquid form?

"This isn't going to be a _thing_," Conrad said at last, voice hard.

"If you can keep me out, I'll stay out." The Luce-shaped blob hopped up on the railing. "So 'spect me back in a few weeks. An' you better have info or you'll hafta use yer own hand next time."

And with that, Luce was gone with a woosh of coat. Shivering madly, Conrad staggered to his balcony and glared upwards, teeth grit and body _very_ caught between being incredibly happy and radically unhappy. Freezing air chilled his feet, cutting crisp along his face and the night yawned empty and black. He shook from more than the cold, then slapped his hands down on the balcony railing.

"Leave me the fuck alone!" he yelled into the night sky with the last of his energy. He was sure he absolutely imagined the mad cackle that answered him in the distance, but then again… it was assumed. Then he got woozy from blood loss and had to stumble back inside and wrestle the doors shut and sit down, grimacing into his hand as the ache started to set in on his neck.

Looks like syfy wasn't the only thing he'd be doing with his nights in the future. Not if he didn't get a better alarm system, that is, but even then… but no, none of that mattered. Not in the face of the whole implied…

Peaches? Was he fucking _serious_?


	4. First Case, Mixed Reviews

A/N: Nyah oh god plot. It reeks. I hate writing faceless archaic demons. G-god I haven't written this much action ever. Ever. My eyes are bleeding, in a good way.

Rae Himura, who is currently peeking over my shoulder, is my love for editing this and generally being awesome. Also she's the shit on magic. She just is.

READERS I LOVE YOOOOU. Yer awesome, seriously. Chapters will generally pingpong between the two pairs unless they cross over (which they will frequently) and new characters are on their way in. Lamont then Veser, you try and wrap yer head round THAT. Heh. Enjoy!

_Warnings: intense violence, adorable zombie-ing, badass unzombie-ing, perhaps fusion concepts on djinns but no one really knows about them anyways so nyah. Also, shotgun with rock-salt totally stolen from Supernatural without shame._

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First Case, Mixed Reviews

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Marc, as he was known at work, labored as a paper-pusher at the local police station.

The men who processed him tried to help him get a leg up on his new life, and so gave him a low job at the station. He outgrew it and turned to filing reports, perhaps because he was instinctively drawn to life as a police officer and he didn't have anything _but_ instinct to draw from at the time. Hanna's chaotic arrival with the business card was only a confirmation of what he had already suspected: he had always known he was a detective, he just couldn't figure out how to get back there.

His therapist hadn't been the only one who was nervous about him working at the police station, but was certainly the most vocal about it. She feared he would obsess and keep looking over missing persons reports for any glimpse of himself, but, truth was, the Detective knew he wasn't going to find himself in any of the files that went through his hands. Something far darker had happened to him: in the meantime, he just wanted to help people. He couldn't stay away from the station or the order it represented to him. Plus, it helped him get leads on possible supernatural activity and it paid well enough to keep him and, recently, Hanna in a heated apartment.

Unfortunately it occasionally meant late hours, which wouldn't have been so very unfortunate if his other, unofficial job didn't take off right as the sun went down. That Friday night, knocked out from ruckus at the station, the Detective barely managed to snag a few hours sleep while Hanna did the last of his research on Djinns. The zombie had been glued to his ramshackle piles of journals for the past week, searching for anything that would help them escape in one piece. They had tackled minor bogies before, one or two gnomes and possibly a fluffy vampire bat, but it sounded like this creature could really hurt them. As in, make them visit Dr. Achenleck again and not walk out.

Before the Detective knew it, they were on the dark street again, walking at a brisk pace from his old and peeling mustang. The cold was the only thing keeping his eyes open, for a while. It seemed like he blinked just after returning from the station, but distinctly remembered (with a pang of guilt) waking up and finding Hanna at the foot of his bed, waiting with his eyes glowing anxiously and a leather-bound book in his hand.

"Why tonight?" he asked, flipping his trench-coat up around his neck and doubling his pace to keep up with Hanna's surprisingly speedy legs.

Hanna had insisted (or rather, stated quietly) they wait until Friday to begin their investigation, even when it was right after his longest shift of the week.

"Full moon," Hanna said into the starless sky. The pale circle hung above them like a paper cut-out, fat and unreal. The zombie's partner blinked the last of the sleep from his eyes, confused.

"I thought that only worked with…"

"Lunar energy is strong. It doesn't really matter what kind of creature it is: if they're magic-users or magic-spawned, the chance of luring them out is better on a full moon," Hanna rattled off, staring at his befuddled partner for a moment before turning and walking further down the street. "Unfortunately, it's also when they're at their most powerful."

"That's comforting," he said faintly, following Hanna with the shotgun tucked against his side, hanging heavy in his hand.

No, he didn't own the shotgun. He didn't even own a pistol, and had to wonder why Hanna had the huge rust-spotted mammoth in the first place, but it seemed convenient at the moment. It certainly wasn't the weirdest thing he found when they stumbled onto whatever was left of Hanna's life two months ago.

_In stark contrast to the Detective, the only thing Hanna had was his name. _

_The second night the small zombie stayed with him, he got the bright idea of googling the hell out of it after a full day of fruitlessly sifting through databases at work. They finally found a Craigslist ad where Hanna had foolishly given out his address to the seller of an old shotgun so he could come and drop it off sometime on Tuesday. It was dated a year and a half past. The next step wasn't hard to figure out._

_Full of equal parts trepidation and anticipation that Hanna didn't seem to be feeling, the Detective took the zombie (wrapped in a few layers) to the apartment complex where he had listed himself as living. The pair walked inside the dilapidated, poorly-lit building just far enough to look at the tenet listings. The Detective's questing finger froze over the cracked glass, face falling. Under 606, there was a new name. Something complex and somehow invasive. _

_Adelaide Jensen._

_It had been a year. Of course they had moved him out. Taken all of his things. Erased him. _

_Perhaps he had moved out even before he died and they never had any hope of recovering him._

_Heavy with a disappointment too large to speak of, the Detective turned to take Hanna back to his own apartment and nearly ran into a short, over-tanned woman sporting truly alarming breasts and a gratuitous smear of Barbie-pink lipstick over her frog-mouth._

"_Falk, is that you? Hardly recognized you, what the hell're you doing here now? It's been a year!"_

_This, apparently, was the landlady. She, _very_ apparently, was very angry with what was left of Hanna for skipping out on his lease even if he had paid his last rent-check, because it had been left to her to gut his room. In her humble and loud and grumbly opinion, she should have just thrown it all away, but she stored it in that old nasty room downstairs and it took her four days to do it in between calling maintenance on all those drippy ceiling tiles on the fourth floor and where was her thanks? _

_The Detective just stood where he was, blasted away by the tirade (Hanna stood and stared too, but in an entirely different manner that made the older man feel distinctly like he was completely without back-up in this endeavor), but absolutely couldn't miss that Hanna's things were in one piece. He had _remnants_, for god's sake. Mrs. Blaney, as a quick glance at the room-roster revealed, was in the middle of ranting about how she had to keep Hanna's laptop from being nicked by the ugly kid upstairs, the klepto, but the Detective was still horribly nervous about anyone noticing Hanna's state. He had to find some way to end the encounter, and quickly._

_Lucky for them, she was both far-sighted and in need of glasses, so she didn't notice the tint on Hanna's skin and all it took to stop her mid-word was a little flash of another kind of green._

"_I'll—I'm sorry for all of your trouble, ma'am. Something unexpected came up with Hanna last year, and… I would explain if I had the time, but in the meantime, I'll pay for it. Will this be enough?"_

_It was a fifty. He couldn't spare more, but by the look on the woman's face, he wouldn't have to. Mrs. Blaney suddenly looked downright predatory as she finally noticed the handsome thirty-year-old looking somewhat lost in her humble entryway._

"_Check out the room upstairs, sweet-cheeks, and maybe we can put that towards the down payment," she purred, grisly smoker's voice putting a chainsaw to shame. The Detective's eyebrows shot up as the older woman turned and began to lead them down to the storage closet._

"_Is it… for rent?" he asked cautiously, staying a good five feet behind her._

"_Nope. S'mine," she grinned over her shoulder. "I'm lookin' for a roommate and you look like you'd be nice and clean, honey."_

He gulped. Never in his life had he remembered gulping, nor so loudly. Mrs. Blaney grinned wider and twinkled her manicured fingers at him after she reached the door and tossed Hanna a set of keys. The little zombie looked at them bemusedly for a moment and the Detective stepped back, not knowing what else to do.

"_Uh. Thank you. I am clean," he said stupidly, five minutes too late. Not long after (but all-too-long with Mrs. Blaney staring at him like that), something clicked behind him._

"_It's open, Amadeus." Hanna turned towards the older woman, face blank as always as he shuffled forward and handed her the keys. His old landlady looked back into his glowing eyes without the faintest trace of surprise—_that_ was farsightedness. "Thank you, Mrs. Blaney. We will take everything."_

"_So ya finally found him, huh?" she said, glancing at Hanna as she tucked the keys back into her—breasts? She leaned back, undressing the clean-cut man with her eyes again as she took another huge drag on her stubbed cigarette. "Took you a year, but whatever. Say good men are hard to find."_

_The Detective—still Marc Raney At A Loss, then – looked back over his shoulder with a perplexed expression, but there was Hanna's dry little hand hooking into his and leading him into the storage room. Mrs. Blaney patted the door, throwing the man another supposedly-enticing wink._

"_Have fun, you two. N'lock up when y'leave, Falk. I'll take this as payback fer the time you cleaned those huge rats outta the basement. God, those things were the size of baby cows."_

"_Probably wererats," Hanna murmured, and stepped into the dark he had left behind. _

_After a few swipes at eye-level, the Detective found the light-switch and pulled._

_Several small somethings scattered when they turned on the lights, but the treasure he found in their wake was equal parts amazing and incomprehensible. It was like walking into a crime-scene with a single swinging bulb. The two future partners crouched on the cracked concrete of the storage room, dingy walls crowding them on all sides. Over the next four hours, they tried to sort out evidence in the form of melting stacks of scribble-filled folders, the contents of a holey backpack, a weird cat-clock with those bobbing-back-and-forth eyes, chewed pencils and DVDs. _

_Hanna's old laptop, thankfully unstolen, proved to be the best find. They got into his files with a few keystrokes and figured out what he did before: he was a supernatural crime investigator. The Detective, still reeling at the idea of zombies existing at all, much less one who needed his help, thought this was a little too fitting but believed it anyways. It was debatable whether the young man had been a very successful investigator (several case files were left unfinished or ended with an uncomfortable ambiguity), but the content was revealing in other ways. For instance, the older man found Hanna's notes on projects and supernatural adversaries to be in stark contrast to the image he had of the dead boy sitting next to him. _

_They were intense and stream-of-consciousness, hyper-intelligent but easily distracted and dotted with multiple ellipses and exclamation marks like confetti. It was like alive-Hanna was talking to himself, but only to fill the silence. His email log was blank: the only listed correspondence had been to his boss at work (a department store) and included several angry, somehow chillingly unaware emails dated from a year past, demanding why he had been missing his shifts and then telling him to consider himself fired. Other than that, nothing. Empty._

_That was the Detective's first hint that Hanna was—had been—as alone as he was, and that he shouldn't let the young man go. _

_They took everything they could and made several trips back to gather out the rest of the stuff. Hanna had his own little corner in the Detective's apartment now, and made good use of his peeling old tomes to brush up on his supernatural knowledge. Another useful find had been the shotgun, but when they opened it up, the only thing they found was a trace of something white that wasn't gun powder._

"_Rock-salt," Hanna had said in something like awe, putting his powdery finger to his tongue before the Detective could stop him. "Used for purification."_

"But why the shotgun?" he asked, brow knit.

"_Some things need a face full of purification delivered at high speeds," Hanna answered wisely, wandering off down the hallway and leaving his partner with that charming little piece of knowledge, wondering what kind of world he had fallen into overnight._

Hanna had his name and a store of knowledge that didn't seem to have deserted him after death. It was useful, considering they kept willingly walking into situations where they would have to piss off and usually unseat a volatile creature with nothing but their brains. And now the shotgun. Filled with salt.

The Detective was still dubious about the salt.

They reached the abandoned housing project after ten minutes of walking the quiet streets, edging away from the open doors of bars and the people swaying near lampposts. With each step it felt like they were taking themselves farther away from the living world, a feeling which only intensified when they ducked under the yellow caution tape and took the first, crunching steps into the cavernous grey beginnings of an apartment complex.

Knobby steel girders cut through the air above them, dusty and heavy with six floors of unfinished concrete. The thought of that much weight above the Detective's head unnerved him: made him think of being buried alive while walking around.

Hanna looked around at the haunting spaces between the support columns, eyes flickering like will-o-wisps in the dark. His partner wondered if he was going to walk around the cave-like area and start calling for the djinn, but instead Hanna paced out an area that was nearly central to the building and went to his knees, pulling a piece of chalk from his pocket and drawing a circle on the ground.

He paused only to give his partner a ziplock full of salt, telling him to generously line every window and doorway with it. When the Detective returned, the zombie was scrawling wet black runes up and down his arms, almost running out of space. There was an intensity to the blue of his eyes that the Detective didn't quite like, but didn't know how to interrupt.

Hanna always got shifty when performing magic, or perhaps just certain kinds of magic. His partner didn't know enough to tell the difference between a curse and a charm, honestly, and couldn't get Hanna to elaborate on anything he did that produced that haunting non-light from his green palms. The dead boy had said once that there was a cost to everything, which just left the Detective feeling confused and yet more intent on finding out what burden he was hiding. Unnoticed, Hanna's partner crouched beside him with a creak of his black boots.

"Can I help?" Hanna's chin snapped up, sharpie suddenly pulled close to his bony chest. The Detective smiled uncertainly, gesturing to his arm. "You always… it seems like you'll run out of room, soon. Can you use my arm?"

"No," was his answer, eye-headlights turning back towards the ground. Then, quieter: "I can't let you do that."

"Hanna," he said the dead boy's name slowly as the solemn squeak of sharpie runes started up again. "Does magic hurt you?"

"No."

"Are you saying that because you can't feel anything?" he said almost sternly, already very aware of Hanna's methods of side-stepping questions.

"I feel things. Just not very well," the zombie corrected him, which was a relatively fantastic segue that his partner just let him have. Tonight was not the night for this. Quickly enough to suggest a want of avoiding further conversation, Hanna rose with a scrape of his vans and set out several ashtrays and plastic plates he had collected from his partner's apartment, digging in his recovered backpack and loading them with handfuls of dry and crackling greens. He lit them with a zip lighter, holding it low and close until most of it started to smolder; the pungent smells hit the Detective like a slap from a very dark and dusty Bath and Body Works.

"What are the herbs for?" he wheezed, waving a hand in front of his face as the smoke stung his eyes in waves.

"Repellants. Purifying agents. The djinn won't be able to cross any of the salt-lines you laid and the herbs are for driving it away."

"But… it can't leave."

"Exactly," Hanna said with worrying simplicity.

The Detective was about to question the wisdom in summoning a demon-like creature, trapping it and purposefully angering it, but the chalk circle was already thorny with spiraling scribbles and the night air was thick and grey-green with smoke. They were, as they said, doing this. His hands tightened unconsciously on the shotgun, eyes sticking on every shadow-thick concrete corner.

"I need a breaking tool," Hanna announced as he lay the chalk aside.

"A breaking tool?"

"Something… there." He pointed over into a dark corner. "That hammer."

Hanna's assistant went to get it, thinking how lucky they were to be in a construction site—and that it was just a hammer. He wouldn't quite trust Hanna with, say, a high-powered saw at this point. Hanna took it from his hands and squiggled more little runes on it, which abruptly began to glow a poisonous red.

"Ifrit," Hanna said firmly, then raised the hammer high into the air. He looked up to the ceiling as if talking to himself: calling the words out of a past life as if he were pulling on a single strand of a spiderweb. "I have to break a barrier to call it. Get its attention and force it to enter here."

_You already have my attention, corpse. My respect will cost more than parlor tricks._

The Detective cocked the shotgun with an instinct he didn't know he possessed and the sound slammed through the empty building and ricocheted sharply off the columns. His skin tightened all over. The darkness rippled, suddenly oily. Hanna looked up without rising from his kneeling position, clearly able to trace the disturbance like a black cloud on clear water.

"You are trapped, ifrit,"

_You overestimate the efficacy of your precautions. I am never trapped without knowledge of my name_, the djinn rumbled in a voice darker than tar and deeper than a dry well.

"But you're stuck for the moment and I can make this a very uncomfortable place to be until you cooperate with us." Hanna scraped to his feet and reached back into his pocket, pulling out a dark, blunt rod and raising it into the air.

The Detective felt the very fabric of the night around him twist, pulling away from the cold metal with a visceral jerk. A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck as a low, threatening rumble crept between all the dust-motes and _atoms_, growing and finally breaking into a blank silence more horrible than the noise.

_My boon is my release. Speak your price and know that I may refuse you_, the djinn hissed at last. The oily shadows in the skeleton ceiling shifted in a cramped, twisting fashion that could only be qualified as impatient._ Winds can scatter your salt, corpse, and time will scatter even your dry flesh._

"You are bound to tell us the truth about the death of James Maleck," Hanna said, locked in the middle of the white chalked circle as if nailed there. After a moment, another rumble drifted up from hell and made the concrete around them creak.

_Simple wants for a simple boy. Agreed._

The circle glowed as if acknowledging the pact and the Detective realized this was one creature with which words equaled power, and the deal was real in the same way the pure iron rod was real. But Hanna did not put it back in his pocket and neither did the threatening tension ease from the air. He only hoped the rules of the deal protected Hanna—both of them—from being harmed for the moment, and suddenly hated his complete ignorance of the situation with a passion so strong it hurt.

First thing when they got home (alive), he was cracking a book.

"You murdered James Maleck," Hanna said to the ceiling, voice clearer than usual. The only sign of nerves was his tight grip on both the rod and the hammer. He wasn't following the purposefully cagey stirrings of power in the air but just standing in the middle of it, letting it eddy around his stiff, tiny form in the glowing circle. His partner's eyes widened at the thought of such a direct accusation, but the djinn's answer was calm and even _smug_.

_And brought him to a purpose so much greater than himself._

"You mutilated him."

_I prepared him._

"He had a family."

That wasn't rage in Hanna's voice, so what was it?

_And I needed a messenger._

"For what purpose?" Hanna demanded after a long pause.

_An agent of sorts, to speak of me well. I chose the best that managed to wander near. He had ample time to beg for mercy, and so I did hear of his children that way._

James Maleck had been a salesman for a cleaning supply company, as per the notes Dr. Achenleck had slipped them. Suddenly, something made a bit more sense in the Detective's head even as the beginnings of an incredulous rage built behind his eyes. The half-finished building shuddered with a rock-against-rock scraping that could have been a laugh.

_You will notice I left his tongue in place, despite how it annoyed me._

"You sent him to hell to _ask_ something?" the Detective grit out, too loudly.

With one slither, he literally felt the darkness turn towards him: he felt a third eye opening, noticing him for the first time and drawing him into a web of consciousness. The shiver went so deep into his chest that he nearly fired the gun out of nothing more than chill. Were humans so expendable? He had never felt so terrifyingly small.

_Yes. To ask for a part in something far greater than myself. There is a stepladder of power in the universe and, thanks to the gift of your James Maleck, I am now one step higher._

"What part did you ask for?" Hanna asked.

_So many questions for a hollow child._

"Curiosity doesn't kill cats that are already dead," Hanna said in his strange deadpan, eyes casting blue beams of light into the snippets of void in front of him.

_And why are you out of your grave, little corpse?_ the djinn called from the right, then the left, veering upwards towards the ceiling. Its non-voice held a drifting curiosity, insidious as hovering claws. _The night is cold and those that put you there worked hard to ensure you stayed there_.

"You know something about Hanna?" the Detective said with a fierceness that nearly blindsided him. Suddenly, he could move, and his steps took him closer to the circle with Hanna's gun pointed up into it.

_Perhaps_.

The single word sent a ripple through his aching chest. Half victory, half desperation. Why would something like this know about Hanna's death—or murder?

Had this thing spilled Hanna's blood?

"You're bound to tell the truth. Tell us what you know about Hanna."

"Ignacius, no," Hanna whispered, in that strained monotone that told the Detective it should have been a shout, but his boot had already broached the circle.

The black of his boot was like a crack in a dam; most of the glow dribbled out of the seal, whirling around his knees and disappearing into the night, which had suddenly gotten denser and colder.

_Your knight has entered our circle and added conditions we did not agree upon. Our deal is broken and with it, my patience,_ the djinn snarled, gathering itself with a soundless heave of matter. _I would have let you go if you had not been so insistent on being obnoxious. You know nothing of the shift that will alter your world and it would take far more to interfere with it, but humans do such great damage with such little knowledge. Your deaths are inevitable._

Every single shadow in the skeleton of the building gathered and swelled around a sudden seed of fire. The Detective didn't have time to feel guilt or panic or jerk away from the chalk circle, but stood transfixed by the bloom of hell unfolding in front of his eyes and in his mind. It tunneled down his throat and seared his broken chest, momentarily too large for a human psyche to bear. This was insanity; this was the omniscient possibility of total annihilation that humanity had trained itself not to believe in.

He hardly saw the quick, vicious movement as Hanna dropped back to his knees and brought the hammer down in the middle of the seal, but was thrown several feet in the air when a geyser of yellow light punched up from the floor.

He hit the unfinished concrete hard on his shoulder, grunting as the shotgun went skidding off to the side. Numbness bursting along his arm, he scrabbled forward and managed to get it just in time for Hanna to grab the back of his trench-coat and drag him behind the nearest support column, kicking up a cloud of dust that was instantly lit up by another burst of yellow. It was a moment of raw behind-the-wall panting and very in-the-room roaring before the older man pieced together what the hell had happened. The portal. The breaking tool.

"It wants to kill us and you brought it _here_?" he demanded, the barrel of the shotgun icing his dripping cheek.

"He was going to kill you magically. You wouldn't have had a chance," Hanna said, soft voice failing to reflect the sudden hyper-intelligent hardness in his electric blue eyes. He hoisted his rune-covered hammer up, bracing himself against the wall. "I caught it off-guard and forced it through. This way, we can injure it. Djinns are weaker when in their corporeal forms. Comparatively."

A fireball went hauling past them and cracked against a column, sending out a wave of flame so intense it made the older man recoil from the heat alone.

"Comparatively?" the Detective whispered, answered by a curt nod from his partner.

"Comparatively."

He could hear the djinn roaring at them, but in a slithering, coughing language he didn't understand. He didn't know whether it was better or worse that he wasn't informed in advance how many different ways it was planning on disemboweling them. That lack of knowledge might have been the only thing that got him up on his feet with the shotgun in hand, then charging side-by-side with Hanna towards the dark smear in the flame.

He only got glimpses of it through the distortion of red and yellow flame: two sets of arms, skinny and wiry and ending in twisted claws. Teeth hooked over black lips. Burning eyes. Terror incarnate.

He veered off to the side and raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger, arms jerking viciously and nearly killing the shoulder he landed on. His cry mixed like oil and water with the djinn's furious sound: the result of having hundreds of tiny stinging holes torn in its back. He blinked to clear the pain from his eyes, but it was immediately replaced by the twisted, muscular shape of the djinn hurtling towards him, meaty feet pounding against the concrete.

Panic nearly froze him. He tried to raise the gun again but the creature swatted it out of his hands and he jumped back just quickly enough to avoid having the djinn's claw sunk into the soft of his gut and ripped back out again. The knives still cut his thigh to ribbons and the pain hit him from both sides when he fell hard on his tailbone, agony plugging his throat. The huge grey-skinned myth flexed and roared above him and blood poured down his knee.

"You stay away from Imhotep!"

Before the creature could so much as bend down, a blast of green light nailed him in the back. The djinn arched, which gave Hanna the perfect foothold as he leapt on its shoulders and started chunking the hammer into the demon's conical head again and again, sharp side down. The Detective scrambled to his feet; the djinn roared and reached back with one of its sinewy arms. With one whipping motion, it tore the little rag zombie from its back and flung him aside with a murderous noise, blood or some dark hot substance making tracks down its mottled grey chest.

"_Hanna_!" he shouted as he ran for the gun, snatching it up and turning around. He fired blindly, which saved his life: he caught a split-second flash of the djinn's open eyes a mere hands-span away, before a blast of white occluded its face and sent it flat to the floor, writhing as a dark pool spread underneath it.

He tried to stagger away, towards Hanna, but something hit the concrete next to him with a painfully sharp clang. The dark rod rolled towards him, almost invisible against the scorched concrete and blood.

"Stab it. Stab it in the chest with the iron rod before it can get back up."

Not stopping to think, the Detective grabbed it and moved to the djinn's side, arm already raised high. The djinn convulsed and its arm moved up as if to knock him away, then suddenly _stopped_ under the cold weight of the iron. He felt that stop through the hand he had on its chest; it was pulse-deep, on a molecular level. Ruined eyes turning towards him, it put a hand over its hideous raw face.

It was in that odd, almost deferential pose the moment that the Detective took the iron rod and plunged it down into the soft of its chest, right under where the ribcage was supposed to be. He felt it puncture complex, ancient knots of innards. Liquid spurted, then bubbled over his hand. The djinn roared into its palm and a shockwave knocked the Detective off his feet, scrambling his mind.

For a moment all he could do was lie there and bleed and breathe on the concrete, but then a rumbling sound grew around the fallen man, so deep it shook his heart inside his ribs. It wasn't like when the djinn was first summoned, but far more sharp and physical, and that got the Detective up and running even before the first chunks of plaster and concrete started falling around them, cracking growing to a roar.

"Hanna! Hanna, where are you?"

He plunged through the smoke until he found the little figure slumped against a wall. He got an arm around the zombie's middle and plowed forward, hardly believing how little Hanna weighed as steel bars fell like arrows around him. He felt his boot break the line of salt as they escaped and sent up a little prayer that the thing they had left behind was more corporeal than incorporeal—and that it would stay buried with the building.

They didn't get out just as it collapsed, but a few seconds before: just enough time for the Detective to skid to an agonizing stop on his knees, Hanna tight against his chest, and turn around to see the entire building crumble in on itself. He got to see the carnage in excruciating detail. Struts crumpled and slid into other struts, which snapped under the weight and sent other floors breaking underneath them.

"Oh god," he whispered under the booming mayhem, realizing not what they had just escaped but what would be a very, very bad thing to get caught near when the police arrived.

"Oh… no."

It was Hanna. Somehow, that phrase from him made his head snap around so fast it nearly cramped. Hanna _never_ said 'oh no'.

The zombie was on his back, still in possession of both eyes and all four limbs—except that one of those limbs was cradled against his chest, cleanly ripped off at the seams with a little white bone peeking out in the moonlight. His arm had fallen off.

At first, he just couldn't breathe. But then he realized that Hanna's face was pricked with only the faintest of discomforts and he was turning his severed arm over in the freezing air as if it were a curiosity. He wasn't hurt. At least, not much. Just… confused.

The Detective, caught by something better than insanity, suddenly laughed to the moon. He laughed loud and long, about the building behind them and the demon they'd just killed and the triple-gash on his leg and the severed arm he now had to find a way to stitch back on. Because Hanna the zombie, his partner in paranormal investigations, certainly couldn't stitch on his own arm one-handed: what, was he crazy?

"At least you grabbed it on the way out," he chuckled, voice weak with that sudden sucker-punch of mirth. It bled him nearly as much as the wound on his thigh, which definitely shouldn't have been pressed against the filthy sidewalk like it was.

"That's true," Hanna said thoughtfully, now looking at his arm as if it were one of his journals. It certainly had enough writing on it to pass for it.

"Come on," the Detective said softly, helping Hanna to his feet and taking a look at the rubble.

Well, they'd lost the shotgun. Maybe it was better this way—didn't exactly suit their style, anyways. Smiling faintly, he took Hanna's stick-thin arm from him and carefully tucked it against his side like he had the gun. It fit. Should he put it on ice when he got home?

God, he hurt. He hurt all over, too much to think through or about. Was he even alive, still?

"Let's get out of here before someone calls the police."

"Are your friends on patrol tonight?" Hanna asked as they started to limp away, hammer swinging at his side almost merrily. Almost like his arm hadn't gotten ripped off five minutes ago.

"Yes. Yes, they are," his partner admitted, thinking with a wince of what would happen if Horace caught him like this. _Especially_ Horace. It made him walk a little faster and tuck the limb a little further under his jacket.

"You don't know how to sew," Hanna stated after another cold, silent, numb block of walking.

He winced again. That was the reason he had been so nervous about anything happening to Hanna's stitches in the first place. He couldn't sew a straight line. He didn't know anything about zombie joints or nervous systems, either, and he'd prefer to trust that to someone who knew dead people intimately. He patted his partner on the back as police sirens wound up in the black distance, on a screaming beeline for the pile of rubble they'd left behind them.

"Don't worry. We've got a … doctor for that."

If this was any indication of their upcoming cases, Dr. Achenleck might be getting very, very sick of them in the near future.


	5. Distraction

A/N: HOOHOO. God, I have the most fun writing these two. S'like crack, yeah, they bounce off each other like AWESOME. Oh, and totally stole a snippet of their dialogue from the Conrad-Worth incentive comic because I'm lame, er, boss like that.

Rae Himura, I will write sonnets to you one day. You's amazin with yer words. Unedited version to be found at the y!gallery club.

Luce no likey hat-man :[ He thinks he smells bad and steals his little zombie pal away. WHY HAT-MAN WHY.

Warnings: intense sexual content, blood stuff, language

Notes: Uh, vamps can sex here/in this 'verse/as I sometimes believe. So have fun. OH, and blood-alcohol content is measured in percentages. Luce is a REAL doctor, he knows this stuff.

* * *

Distraction

* * *

Cold fingers twisting at the condensation-coated bars, he lingered for a moment more on the rusting fire-escape before dropping down a level.

He hit the metal balcony soundlessly, then craned over to catch sight of a young man with a tangle of red hair ducking out of an old black car in the scraped-raw parking lot below him. The boy was quickly joined by a tall, thin man with a trench coat. They spoke for a minute; hat-man jostled what was quite obviously a shotgun under his jacket and they started off at a cautious pace. Face hidden beneath the brim of his orange-trimmed fedora, the older man's almond eyes slowly turned just to the left of where Luce lurked flat against the grey tenement building, needle-sharp teeth grit.

They were off. A few more steps and they were out of sight, leaving the vampire vacillating between following them a few more blocks and asking what he could really accomplish by stalking an inept amnesiac and the kid who managed to loop him in for one of his classic supernatural clusterfucks. Neither of them knew where they were going, probably. The only hope they had was making it back to the car intact enough to drive back to wherever hat-man was keeping Hanna.

The car; that fucking ratty old mustang. Luce sneered afresh, glaring down at the faded black blemish steaming quietly on the wet concrete. What an idiot, living out some detective-noir fantasy and he couldn't even hide a shotgun without practically limping. Should have known it from the fedora.

He wasn't going to be able to protect Hanna from himself, that was certain.

The thought sat cold and thorny in his gut, as it had since he first saw them. As it had since the little voice said he could probably drop down in front of them on a sidewalk, wait for hat-man to shoot and miss, and stop the idiots before they could kill themselves. Hanna would hop up and drag him along right away, probably shit his pants to see him.

Luce tried to tell himself his misreckoning of zombie biology was the only thing wrong with that last sentence.

The vampire glared into the black city night for a solid minute before suddenly hopping up onto the rail and jumping to the next roof, coat flaring out behind him. He hit and slipped, making an unholy stomp-scraping racket before catching onto an air-duct head, claws twisting the thin metal. Like a dog half-shoved from its perch, he limped up and sat down with a low, absent growl, then slapped at his chest with numb hands and willed the distracting cold away.

So fucking cold tonight. All the water in the air, like the frigid filthy sloshing contents of the port had come to fucking eat them all. Hated it.

Hated it even more than thinking about shit he didn't have any business thinking about.

Hanna looked good. He wasn't quite green: in fact, he looked way more alive than anyone dead had a right to, minus the blue head-light eyes. Then again, he'd only been dead a year. Luce didn't even try to place the date. Months went by like water to vampires who had been alive as long as Luce.

Of course he'd noticed the punk had split. Hard not to miss that much whining and yelling and 'Hey Worth, look at what I found I thought you might like it', which was, of course, immediately followed by something trying to eat them or curse them or some shit. Luce figured Hanna had just gotten up and hitchhiked his way to Chicago like he was always talking about. He insisted they had the largest congregation of shape-shifters there and they needed to be dealt with, or at least negotiated to a different location (and shape-shifters really liked peanut butter so it should be easy enough so long as he got one of those industrial-size peanut-butter jars, you know, and maybe like built a peanut butter cannon).

It was like him, wasn't it, to go on a road trip to save some random city, get totally filthy and bloody in the process, get no thanks (and probably a threat of arrest), then come limping back to him totally broke with that sheepish "Well _this_ time" grin. Luce would patch him up like before, no problem, provided he had the necessary pieces left. Little shit just had to come back.

But he never did.

Frustration and something chillier crystallized under Luce's white skin, making his every muscle tense up. Before the feeling could gut him, the vampire turned and drove his fist into the air-duct that had saved him a minute ago, leaving a sharp indentation and an echo of a growl on the frigid air.

Fuck. He could usually find enough pleasure in just _prowling_ to keep him occupied, but not tonight apparently. Tonight just had to be _complicated_.

He finished the duct off with another punch and sent the whole battered thing flying. He watched it almost maliciously as it rolled off the roof and went bouncing into the alley between the next building. The sharp sound made a pedestrian stop a few street-lamps up and look back, holding his bag close to his chest. Luce glared at the wanderer next, just to make his point, then his expression abruptly blanked. The next moment, the vampire was crouched at the edge of the corrugated roof, red eyes wide.

Sweater-vest. Tie. Neatly pressed slacks. Faggy point of black hair bookended by faggy sideburns. Quick-but-not-too-quick walk for such a questionable part of town.

Could it fucking be?

A wide, sleazy grin spread over Luce's face and the cold made a reluctant retreat in favor of a distraction of another sort.

* * *

The bus was full. Like a good guy, he let the old lady on. He would say he didn't regret it, except that it left him walking home at one a.m. in the middle of the sleaziest part of downtown with nothing but a messenger bag, which practically screamed 'steal me and my iPad and don't forget to kill my previous owner so he can't talk'.

Fuck, what did old ladies even _do _at this time of night?

Conrad fought to keep his pace unsuspicious, walking with his chin up and his fingers only slightly dug into his bag-straps as he skittered between flickering streetlamps. To deepen his paranoia, the old city offered up gouts of steam from the gutters and black alleyways that stood to the sides like the Cyclops' cave in Odysseus. When something clanged in one of them, Conrad nearly dropped his bag and bolted down the street.

He waited until nothing came stumbling out of it (and he waited quite a while because now his catalog of Things that Lurked in Alleyways was infinitely larger and included vampires), then turned and started walking quicker than he liked, staring anxiously at the cracks in the sidewalk.

He just wanted to get home. Just wanted to get home and take a shower and go to bed. It had nothing to do with the fact that Millie from filing had offered him an old-fashioned cake doughnut _with sprinkles_ this morning because that's what happened when you came into work _in the morning_, people ate doughnuts and offered you one and so what if it just so happened to be the type that your undead stalker generally liked to —

Something scraped just behind Conrad, so sharp and _behind his ear_ that he spun around so fast he nearly slipped, clapping a hand to his heart. The sidewalk, slick with rain and the buttery smear of the yellow streetlamps, was empty. Empty.

He breathed out.

He had barely turned around when something pegged him in the small of the back, making him jump and his skin tighten sharply under his jacket. He whirled around again, hands balled into shaking fists. Then he saw the rock on the ground.

They were miles from any sort of garden. He looked around the dark road suspiciously, breathing a little too fast. He bent forward with the utmost of caution, picked it up with numb fingers and then realized the rock in his hand was the white stone he'd found in the murdered man's throat. The one that should have been lying in the morgue he had locked behind him when he left work.

Conrad's blood made the violent leap from icy to _ice_ and he looked around with burning eyes, feeling the very night closing in on him.

"You better stop dicking with me," he said under his breath, talking to every punk who had ever lived. Even undead ones. Then, to give himself a little steam, he straightened and shouted, "You hear me? _Huh_?"

_Yeah, like anyone would really go running at that_, he thought disparagingly, feeling a little embarrassed for even trying. He waited a moment, heart high in his throat, but the city night gave no answer. Conrad felt the hairs on his neck rise, then forced himself to breathe out and turn around—and ran right into Luce's leering face.

He screamed and jumped back, slapping at the man and nearly falling on his ass as Luce laughed uproariously, hands on his hips.

"I _knew_ you were going to do that! I fucking _knew_ you were!" Conrad hollered hoarsely when he found his voice, shoving at the vampire's chest angrily. Luce jerked back slightly, not exactly expecting that, then snickered low in his face.

"N'ya still screamed like a lil' girl."

Okay, _now_ he was embarrassed, but Conrad mustered up what was left of his shaking ego and grit his teeth and glared up at him, thoroughly convinced he was _not_ taking this man's—_animal's_—shit tonight.

"You are such a fucking five-year-old," he hissed, shaking the stone in Luce's unshaven face. He couldn't even ask him why he was _there_ yet because his pile of previous offenses was already too fucking high. "This is evidence! This is fucking _evidence_ and you could have ruined it! How did you even get it? How? I always fucking lock the door! Did you steal it when you broke in the first time or are there some cut wires I haven't found yet?"

Luce's only answer to the barrage of questions was a cocky little grin. At length, Conrad crumpled and sighed, putting his hand over his eyes. It was like talking to a thirteen-year-old with a ten-inch dick. Luce was _always_ right, or at least better equipped, in his own mind.

At least the stupid vampire hadn't broken into his apartment again, right?

"What the – god, for the thirteenth time, what the hell do you want?"

"I wanna take you out for a drink," Luce said without preamble, hands going — _deviously_, somehow – into his pockets. Conrad had to stare for a second before actually hearing it, then he pissily readjusted his messenger bag with a flick of his shoulder.

"Haha." Conrad glared up at him, willing the vampire's head to combust. "_No_."

"Aw, sorry, y'thought that was me bein' all cute and vampiric," Luce whined, rolling his eyes and grabbing the coroner's skinny arm as he turned to go. He yanked Conrad straight and pointed over towards an intersection flickering with dying neon. "Over there, dumbass. Bar. Whiskey. You and me."

"Wh—can vampires even?" Conrad half-asked dumbly, bowled over equally by the concept and the idea of being seen with Luce in public. Two encounters weren't much to judge from, but this had seemed like more of a … dead-of-night, _personal_ sort of stalking relationship. Then again, Conrad wasn't any expert on qualifying relationships. He'd only had one, and would only own up to half of it on a good day.

"I been one longer'n you been alive. I would know. F' I'm wrong, you kin stake me."

Luce was off and walking before Conrad could even disagree, sharp nail tickling at the air in a come-hither-puppy motion.

"Shut up and come on. I'll buy."

Implicit, perhaps, was the threat of stalking Conrad all the way home and doing his drinking _there_ (and the coroner didn't even want to think about the connotation involved in his offer of staking), so Conrad actually found himself stepping into the dimly-lit bar a moment after Luce, telling himself he was just escaping the cold. After that scare, the idea of walking all the way home cold-turkey just made his gut shrink. He just needed a moment of safe people and safe public, and a warming drink didn't sound so bad. Especially since all the fluids would be normal and sterile and … not pertaining to his own body.

He saw Luce crouched at the bar like a surly vulture with that coat of his, which he realized was way too fucking thin to fend off the cold in any real fashion. He drifted over and scooted a stool at least a foot further away from the vampire before sitting down. Glancing over at him, Luce raised a dirty hand to the lopsided collection of bottles with undue grandiosity.

"Pick whatever yer faggy lil heart desires. World's yer oyster, peaches. Hey, that'uns pink," he pointed out helpfully, as if that explained everything. Conrad glared at him. After ordering his favorite cosmopolitan (which earned him a snort from Luce), he pulled it close to his chest and looped his arm around it, like it was a barrier to keep Luce from slipping anything into it.

"What's... the occasion?" he asked suspiciously, taking a sip and glancing around at the other hunched patrons. The only sources of light in the bar were the bottle-green lamps over the pool tables, some nearly-dead neon signs and the jukebox in the corner. It left most of the place in shadow, with men moving and shuffling like fat beetles in the dark. With Luce next to him, Conrad wasn't, perhaps, as freaked out as he should have been.

"Can't I have a drink with a frien'?"

"Friend. Being a bit presumptuous, aren't we?" the coroner muttered, expression souring. Two drinks, one non-consensual, didn't make for friendship. _There was also the handjob_, his mind put in worriedly, but he batted that away.

"Fine," Luce sneered, plucking up his freshly filled shot-glass with a flick of his sort-of delicate fingers. "Consider it an apology."

"For what?" Conrad asked, more than slightly—alright, really fucking shocked.

"Fer whatever y'want it to be, s'like a fuckin wild-card in Uno. C'mon, don't gay this up with your fuckin' whiny voice," Luce groaned, hissing before tossing a shot back and grimacing. Conrad, unfortunately, was getting so used to being abused that he just blinked suspiciously. Luce waggled the shot glass until the barkeep sloshed amber into it again. The vampire raised it to him, not waiting for him to answer the toast with his martini glass.

"Les' drink. Plain an' simple."

Conrad still didn't quite trust him, despite (or perhaps because) of how many times he had escaped life-threatening, Luce-induced situations in a relatively unharmed state. But as long as he took the shots directly from the bartender, there was no chance of Luce —what, poisoning him? He would wonder why the vampire would want to poison him, since it was his blood he was interested in, but he'd also said this wasn't going to be a _thing_. And it wasn't. And Luce hadn't come back to his apartment, true, so he had still abided by that rule, so that meant that _this_ thing wasn't part of that other thing that wasn't happening…

Wait, was he making exceptions for the vampire? _Was he_? Another shot said no.

The next one said this was only normal, and looked forward to yet another cosmopolitan.

They mostly drank in silence, and Conrad didn't quite know how he had made the transition between humoring Luce and getting totally fucking smashed on a Friday night like a normal twenty-seven-year-old, but there he was. He hadn't done this since he was twenty-four, was severely short on this sort of awful bleak male bonding activity, and the occasional clink of shot-glasses between them was like a pact. The vampire wasn't asking about Hanna (who the coroner actually _hadn't seen for real this time_, thank you kindly) and Conrad wasn't offering.

They drank. And drank. And drank. Surfacing for air, Luce asked him if he always ran home from work or if it was almost time for Desperate Housewives. Conrad told him to fuck off and then got another shot, telling himself he would seriously punch the vampire if he said something else.

Luce, of course, did. Conrad was drunk enough by that point to elbow him in the gut, low and lame and soft. Luce laughed sharply and scooted his stool over, making Conrad wince away immediately. The vampire just put his chin on his shoulder and looped a finger in the coroner's back belt loop and _tugged_ in a way that made Conrad escape to the grimy bathroom for a second, where he splashed his face with grey water and swore never to do that again.

Vampires' sexual kinks were never good to let slip your mind, especially if they involved a vital part of fighting back: pain. Punches were probably like foreplay to Luce. If the asshole tried anything, he told his scum-occluded reflection, maybe he would just start singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Luce would get disgusted and leave.

By the time he started looking around enough to notice that he might not have been the only person in the bar with a supernatural escort, Conrad was seriously gone. He amused himself for a while by looking across the bar where the bottles of liquor were doubled by the mirror, appreciating the artistic glow of the red neon light on the side of his own bespectacled face — then realized he was sitting next to a floating fur-lined coat. He looked at Luce beside him, dusty and grizzly and solid, then back to the jukebox his head should be blocking. His mouth fell open.

"Holy fuck."

He pointed at the ghost-coat. Luce nodded, focusing on tackling his next shot with a vaguely nauseated look on his face, but Conrad couldn't stop staring. Even if he had enough evidence to have Luce arrested (and some very twisted half-good memories), it was like he had never really _registered_ until this moment what he was dealing with. A vampire. An honest to god, fit-the-myth vampire.

He'd erased video footage of Luce, but he hadn't actually taken the time to look it over. He was probably invisible there too — or did digital cameras act differently than photographs and mirrors?

"Explains why you look like shit all the time," he said curiously, which the vampire answered with a charming little sneer.

"Naw, puppy, you blame that on my hair stylist."

Conrad cocked his head and just _looked_ at Luce—or the definite lack of Luce. He furtively passed a hand behind the vampire's head. Of course he could see it. But … could he see the whiskey slide down his throat? Obviously it had to disappear at some point: there wasn't a creepy-as-hell sack of blood and whiskey floating around in the chair. And, of course being a closet sci-fi nerd, he got into the physics of it. Was he a disruptive invisible or was he a passive invisible?

"Can you make shit invisible?" Conrad asked blearily, finally giving into his curiosity after the third time trying fruitlessly to decide _when_ the whiskey disappeared after the shot-glass levitated up and emptied. His vision weaved and he pushed his glasses back onto his nose. "Does it … like, does something disappear when it's in your hand?"

Luce looked at him for a split second as if he were the most awful breed of fucking idiot the world had to offer for even caring about stuff like that, then his scowl abruptly —dangerously — snapped to a smile.

"Lesse, then."

"How?"

"S'periment."

He leaned over and Conrad made a supremely stupid 'Oh' noise as Luce grabbed the front of his sweater-vest and smirked in his face for a moment before leaning over and —_oh_.

Luce toyed with his bottom lip before kissing him, pushing into his cosmopolitan-coated mouth with all the grace of a snake. After a sickly-strong jolt of nerves that nearly took him off his stool, Conrad gave in immediately. He closed his eyes and pushed back with a light, breathless noise, hand falling on Luce's stick-thin thigh. He was so drunk and relaxed it was almost shameful, but he felt his body tighten up again with wonderful violin-string plucks as Luce twisted and pushed a thumb against the inseam of his slacks and kissed him deep and _good_ while pulling on his shirt.

It took the coroner a few seconds of _amazing dead man kissing_ before he sort of remembered this was a science experiment. He opened his eyes. He could see the barkeep looking away (too drunk to care, wasn't it fantastic), then forced his eyes to the mirror—and there it was. There it fucking _was_.

It was… his pink tongue hanging in mid-air, twisting in his wide-open mouth. He looked like a frog, like he was trying to tie a cherry stem or catch a fly or—Conrad snorted hard and jerked away from Luce, _possibly_ spraying snot on his face but his gut was hurting too hard to care. He just laughed and laughed into his hand, barely hearing Luce's _nowwhatthefuck_ grumble.

He laughed. When he was done, he laughed some more. For some reason he found it the most fucking hilarious thing he had ever seen.

"Oh god," he wheezed, patting his heart, "Think I'm a little drunk."

Luce's answer was to slam another shot in front of him. At that point, Conrad didn't even notice that Luce had stopped drinking, nor that the vampire was looking at him like he would look amazing in a shot-glass himself. When Conrad felt another tug at his belt-loop, his only response was to laugh.

It was easy enough to get him up off his stool with a few more shots to pad his poor judgment; the coroner's unsteady chuckle continued all the way to the back of the bar as the vampire's breath cooled his neck, a grimy hundred left on the bar to mark their stay.

"Wait, uh—wait. Luce, my car isn't parked here. This isn't even close to my car. Oh god, oh wait. I didn't drive here!"

The heavy metal clang of the bar's back door failed to knock Conrad out of his stupor, but it was sort of understandable because it was so _hard_ to think mature, adult, self-preservative thoughts with Luce walking him backwards into the dark alley and biting at the tips of his fingers. It was like someone was tickling behind his ears every time those sharp teeth nicked him. He couldn't help but squirm when the vampire sucked, swirling his tongue over the pink tips of his fingers. It tickled so damn much and would probably make him pretty hard if the bastard kept it up.

Silly vampires and their oral fixations. Didn't Luce know he had to get home and sleep like a normal person?

"Quit. I'm gonna need those," he chuckled, twisting away. He hardly knew how he ended up bumping into a concrete wall like a lazy balloon, but he was suddenly laughing up at the small sliver of night sky above him. Jesus it was cold, but he didn't care. Felt so warm just underneath his skin.

"Yer a healthy point-oh-nine," Luce said somewhere in front of him, running his tongue over his teeth. He walked up to the swaying coroner with that practiced-drunk walk, red eyes sharp with anticipation and drink.

Backed against the alley wall, Conrad stared at the bloodless hand that came down on one side of him, trying to gauge the distance and failing miserably and downright _giggling_ instead. But that might have had more to do with Luce's cool, chapped mouth against his ear, breath tickling him something vicious.

"Christ, you smell good. Mmm."

The vampire's voice was an ardent growl-purr, nice and deep and just the right note to make Conrad's spine vibrate. Except that his spine was now definitely wired into his dick, which hardly needed the encouragement. He heard Luce chuckle and it was like a jump-start to his motor, making him close his eyes and grin. The vampire's hand toyed at his belt.

"Y'wanna fuck, Connie?"

"Yeah," Conrad slurred, never remembering being this drunk in his life so it made perfect sense that he could admit that he wanted to fuck Luce. He wanted to. He wanted to take those emaciated hips and push them down on the bed and bite at his stubbly jaw and fuck a dead man.

Yep. Screw professional courtesy, he wanted that corpse.

He didn't see Luce's eyes gleam, but made a soft little _ooh_ noise when the vampire nosed at him. Floating, he just leaned against the alley wall and felt all the great little sensations as Luce lazily kissed up his throat, inhaling as if savoring a warm, unique bouquet. Below, Luce's long fingers tugged his button-down out of his pants and played along his stomach, through shy swirls of fuzz, making Conrad's toes curl in his fancy white shoes.

Conrad smiled at nothing in particular—except for the fact that a guy was touching him for the first time in forever (except for that last time) and it was so good he could totally ignore the fact they were in an alleyway in public. It was too late for people to be out anyways, except for maybe vampires. At the image of a gaggle of voyeur vampires (and maybe one stupid old lady) watching him get fondled in an alleyway, Conrad laughed hard again. He was quieted only by Luce's mouth, and even then he chuckled into his lips.

He was so warm and I-don't-care, and Luce's hand slid down the front of his pants so smoothly, Conrad didn't react until the vampire skillfully rubbed his palm between his legs, through his briefs — and _then_ he opened his eyes.

"Eventually. _Eventually_!" he exclaimed, fumbling with Luce's skinny-ass wrist and yanking his hand out of his pants. He stumbled away and panted, a light film of sweat coating his face. "Maybe! And, like, in a bed! Jee-christ, not here!"

"Not ready ta take our love public, are we?" Luce drawled, hand already on the coroner's hip again.

"Not ready to get boned in a back alley!" Conrad corrected him, fussing with the front of his slacks. It took him a second to realize Luce hadn't actually _undone_ them so he just locked his hands over them like a chastity shield. He could suddenly feel the grittiness of the concrete wall against his back, the garbage and shadows lying to all sides.

He was in an _alleyway_, for Christ's sake, and he _did not_ know this man. Thing. _Vampire_.

Holy fuck, how did he _get_ here?

"Do you have _any_ idea—"

"How hot it kin be? Yeah. Now shut up and deal."

Conrad flinched away into the wall when Luce reached for him, one hand blocking his neck. For a second, the only sound was him breathing way too hard, with complete silence from Luce's end. Way too close to his face but still _stopped_, the vampire looked at the coroner almost appraisingly.

"When's the last time you got laid, Connie?" he whispered against his shoulder. Conrad wilted, looking determinedly over at the mouth of the alleyway as if looking for a rescuer. No one came. He swallowed.

"I, uh—well, it's—c-complicated. Really … sorta complicated."

"_Never_ is just one lil' word," Luce snickered like a bully, finger wandering Conrad's pant-line.

"No, not _never_," Conrad blurted from his toes, going defensive. He was _not_ a virgin.

… But only by two, and both had kind of sucked. A lot. And Luce didn't suck. That way, at least, and he kissed so goddamn messily and good and it was so fucking hard to think with him this close, and —

"Then lemme make it simple fer once in yer life," Luce said, pulling Conrad so close their chests scraped together, but there was enough room for the vampire's hand to snake down to the front of his pants again, rubbing roughly. "That feel good?"

"Oh. Yes. Oh fuck, yes, don't stop," Conrad burst out breathlessly, head falling back and hips twitching. Luce grit his teeth, hearing the sudden, ecstatic spike in the other man's pulse like a hand to his own groin. He forced it into a grin.

"Good."

Before Conrad could protest, the vampire grabbed him at his thighs and heaved him up against the wall. Conrad gasped and sputtered incoherently at being pinned, trying to get some sort of purchase that didn't involve putting all of his weight on Luce, but the way the vampire jostled him like a child said he could. When he finally trusted the vampire to hold him (which also involved knotting his legs around his waist and some truly fucking amazing pressure right where it was wanted) he looked up into Luce's unshaven, grinning face almost fearfully.

"Can … can vampires even —"

"F'you ask me that question one more fuckin' time, I'm gonna suck you dry," Luce growled, grinding the _very_ obvious proof of his competency against Conrad's, which elicited a satisfying and husky _oh_. "Let the vamp do what the vamp does and sit back and enjoy it, eh?"

Luce bent to his neck and sucked at the chill-frosted skin until the rich heat rose again, redolent and promising. One hand gripped at the coroner's ass while the other trailed up and down his chest, pausing to thumb at his nipples through his sweatervest until Conrad was gasping and arching against the concrete, legs shaking. Luce held back and drew it out until the young man was muttering drunken nonsense, covered in a fine, deliciously pungent sweat despite the frigid air. He cleaned the tender crease of Conrad's jaw with his tongue, tasting a metric fuck-ton of anxiety and want.

Luce pricked his neck with a fang, releasing a tiny thread of hot blood, and was about to open him up again when the bar's back door opened with a crisp click behind them.

"What the hell are… Hey. This is a restricted area. Hey. _Hey_, assholes, what the fuck are—"

Luce twisted back and hissed so loudly it shook the air, teeth cleaving the dark of his throat and blood staining his bottom lip, and the man ran back inside with a high-pitched curse. Before the door slammed, Luce was laughing so hard he nearly fell over.

"Christ, I love doin' that," he howled, heaving Conrad up against his front. He relished the immediate moan and the desperate, impassioned tightening of the hands on his back, laughing again. "This is the fuckin' _life_!"

He had just staggered back to the wall when Conrad whispered it in his ear, small and fierce:

"Bite me."

A ripple went over his skin like it hadn't for years. Didn't usually get off on this shit, but this was different. Real different.

"Yeah?" Luce asked huskily, grinning. That devious grin widened when Conrad's hand dug into his hair, gripping and yanking just the way he liked. Pressing him into his neck, just begging him to drink. He had been planning to anyways, of course, but it was always nice to be asked first.

It was the thought that counted.

"C'mon. Bite me, you s-son of a bitch," Conrad whimpered, pushing against Luce's hard, skinny chest to make his point even as he shook. The vampire could smell his fear, but Conrad's arousal was so urgent and thick it nearly drowned it out.

"Hard?" he growled, digging his hands into Conrad's thighs and pushing up against the wall, grinding against him through the front of his pants.

"Not too hard," Conrad whispered, caught between bucking and cringing. Struck dumb, Luce rolled his eyes, slowly learning that there was a _point_ sexy-Conrad could be pushed to before dribbling into lame-Conrad, and he should just take whatever sexy he could get and not force it any further for the sake of preserving his own erection. Christ, humans got more pathetic as the centuries progressed.

He nipped at the soft skin just below Conrad's jaw for a minute more, testing the tenseness in the rest of the coroner's complex body before biting down quickly. The skin split like the curve of a peach, blood spurting out; he felt Conrad tense exquisitely hard then go limp against him. His low moan rippled in the air, intensified by the sudden distortion that feeding always brought on. The alcohol flowed into Luce with the hot blood, warming his cavernous chest instantly, and his eyes eased shut. Rapture stole him from the cold alleyway and the concrete beneath his worn shoes. His hips pulsed against the coroner's angled thighs with every gulp, forcing them both deeper and deeper into the rich darkness as arousal became so intense it was pain and pain intensified to pleasure and back again.

When Luce pulled away, painstakingly _letting go_ of the bird-flutter pulse the darkness in him wanted to chase to the finish, Conrad moaned faintly, shifting sleepily in his arms. He nosed close to the warm, pulsing life in his arms, licking Conrad's neck lazily. Sealing up the wounds so the little princess would let him do it again. And again, and again, if it was this fucking easy to work him down to a moaning pile of faggotry.

Conrad's soft, warm breath brushed his cheek before the coroner kissed him, carefully pressing their mouths together. It was uncoordinated and almost shy, overwhelmed, but he could feel Conrad tentatively tasting the blood on his lips. Sliding the red over his tongue and getting used to it. Sated, Luce sucked absently at the younger man's soft lips and a sort of quiet settled over them in the frozen alley. But the persistent hardness below Luce's belt-line said it wasn't ready for quiet, and he wasn't about to let this go. He was pretty experienced at fucking in alleys and had never been known to turn down a chance to do it. Plus, he wanted to hear Connie make some more fucking delicious noises.

The vampire let Conrad down more abruptly than he'd meant to, surprised by how much booze the faggot could take. The coroner's knees nearly gave out, remedied when Luce turned him around and pushed him briskly against the alley wall, hands steadying his hips.

"Stay on yer feet fer me, peaches, eh," he murmured into his ear, giving it a slight nip before pulling Conrad's belt free and yanking his perfectly pressed pants down. Prim grey briefs flagged around his knees the next second. Leaning heavily on the wall, the coroner gave a sharp moan that could only be described as pathetic when Luce's freshly-warm hand cupped his ass.

Grinning hazily as the full load of the stolen alcohol hit him, the vampire squeezed and petted at him, skimming closer to the insides of his shaking thighs and watching Conrad's fingers scrape and scrabble at the alley wall. He nearly laughed, nearly howled to the moon. Little faggot died just from someone touching his ass, and then there was the sweet confused little _unf_ he gave when Luce gave it a sharp smack just for the hell of it.

_Aw yeah_ was all he could mutter, pushing his trapped cock fiercely against the creamy bared ass and biting his lip at the clumsy jolt of pleasure. The cold was gone; he was all heat and hardness. Alive as well as immortal, if just for a sweet second. Besides, golden alcohol was sloshing in his chest and the man's skin was so stupidly silky under his dirty fingers.

Why not. Why the fuck not.

_Why the fuck not _and a lethal combination of alcohol and hormonescarried the act until both of them stiffened and jerked and jolted and finally collapsed against the alley wall and each other, shaking hard.

For a moment, all was silent except for Conrad, panting. Luce's senses carefully crept back to him, sparked by the bundle of synapses and noises and blood underneath him. He could smell smoke a block away and hear the neon spitting in its tiny dirty tubes. Mostly, his world synced on Conrad's slowing heartbeat.

Still entangled, he drew his fingers lazily through the mess on the princess's inner thigh, long accustomed and even happy with the unforgivable, _warm_ messiness of sex. All the fluids just made it real to him, to his hypersensitive nose and his dry skin. He drew swirls on Conrad's thigh and listened to him pant and sigh and shiver until the wetness went cold.

All the rest of the chill that had been waiting for him rushed him at once, gutting Luce of the best of the blood-blush. Always a price for the good shit. He pulled away with an irritated grunt, leaving Conrad half-naked and crumpled against the wall as the vampire did whatever rudimentary clean-up he thought necessary. That done, he turned and the coroner was flat against the wall and blinking blearily at him, as if he was really curious as to how he got there and why his pants were down.

A little more tired than he cared to admit, the vampire hoped the uptight coroner still had enough stupid-drunk left in him to just pull his pants up and walk off. He was granted half of his wish: Conrad got to buttoning his top button with a very perplexed look on his face before giving an undeniably satisfied sigh, turning white and passing out cold on the alley floor. His glasses went skittering away, a crack in one of the lenses.

"Aw, yer gonna be _that_ guy, ain'tcha," Luce muttered as he re-fastened his belt, eying the man sprawled on the black alley floor, mouth open, upturned ass smeared with soot.

There has always been one, ever since the 1800's, which was the extent of Luce's knowledge. But he bet there were fucking cavemen who had to hang around after smoky hunt parties for that _one_ guy. Still, the little fag downed fifty dollars worth of booze at two a.m. and then had half of it sucked out of him … he was lucky to last as long as he did. The vampire sighed and bent to hoist Conrad over his shoulder, ignoring the tortured _oof_ as that same bony shoulder hit his gut.

Once he ducked back into the bar and flashed a grin at one very nervous security guard, Luce carried the unconscious coroner through the streets at four a.m. and, after leaping a balcony or two and breaking a door, dumped him fully-clothed into his bed. The broken glasses were flung on the table, impact widening the crack. He even left his shoulder-bag on the floor beside the bed where Conrad would nearly step on it, then look at it, perplexed, and maybe get the hint that Luce was less of an asshole than he would ever let on – but that he probably shouldn't count on it. Ever.

What he could count on was far less considerate and far more awful, and would usually leave him with an excruciating pain in his ass.


	6. Check Up

A/N: You know an author loves you too much when: she updates when she's at Comic Con San Diego. TRUETHIS. (Mostly it was hanging around on my desktop with big dewy zombie eyes and I couldn't resist).

Collision chapter. Love it. Utter joy to write, as are ALL OF THESE DAMN CHAPTERS. Thanks again to Rae Himura for beta-reading my shite! Luv u bby!

_Warnings: language, OCs that will only last for a page SORRY_

_Notes: plot, plot, wonderful emerging plot. As always, watch for parallels between character canon and this strange swap-verse._

* * *

Check Up

* * *

The next evening, Conrad wandered around the morgue in a daze, nose red and raw from the constant scrape of his lab-coat sleeve.

He was coming down with something, which was not something that the corpses generally minded, but it made peeling his gloves off to get Kleenex damned annoying. Thus his snotty sleeve, which he was so severely embarrassed about that he shut the blinds to the morgue. It took him a full two hours of piddling around and wiping his nose and sneezing and being miserable to even begin to admit that the damn (rapist) vampire had been right.

Luce broke into his apartment, what, a week ago with his warning, and now Conrad was headachy and feverish. He was also _not_ hungover, which was horribly surprising to him considering the amount of hard liquor he had put down the previous night. Luce probably took half of it out of him, which was a vaguely embarrassing thought that only managed to _be_ embarrassing because he was totally ignoring the stuff that happened after. Totally.

A hangover that size probably would have killed him, but the late night and the exhaustion pushed him over the edge anyways and now, apparently, he was sick. With broken glasses and a shattered window at home, to boot. Grousing, Conrad barely heard the door open behind him over his own sniffling, but jumped at the sound of his name—his title—in a deep, soft voice.

"Dr. Achenleck?"

He turned around and nearly dropped his scalpel into Marina Pollock's open chest, _uh_ing nervously. The Detective and his zombie were hovering at the morgue door. Conrad was suddenly incredibly, unbelievably glad he had drawn the blinds, and knew there was some awful reason the Powers That Be had spared him the hangover.

The little zombie was wrapped in coats and scarfs, like before. His partner was wearing his signature orange button-down, holding a green stitch-riddled arm in his hand and tucking it only slightly under his long coat. The little dead boy missing it was staring intently at Conrad, looking not at all put off to be reduced to three limbs.

"It popped off," the Detective said, a little green himself but far more sheepish.

"Holy fuck," Conrad said blankly, unable to do more than just _stare_ at them. The Detective's trench-coat had scorch-marks on it and was just washed-out enough to show shadows of what might have been either tar or blood soaked into the tattered fabric. What the hell had they been doing?

"We're… really sorry to bother you."

Conrad looked up and the pair were staring at him expectantly, which honestly didn't make a lick of sense to his stuffy and feverish brain. He squinted through his broken glasses.

"Uh. What are you bothering me about, again?" he said, voice a little higher than he would have liked. A clammy chill wandered his arms and his back, as if it couldn't decide where to settle down.

"You're a doctor, aren't you?" the older man asked, hope and apologies both evident in his expression as he raised the arm a little higher. The arm. Which Hanna was missing. Which he probably should sew back on soon or else it would start rotting or something equally unpleasant. Really, what was it still doing un-attached?

"Oh," Conrad said, breath catching as it clicked for him. "Oh god, hell no, I am _not_ getting into this."

Conrad Achenleck, as a rule, was fine with cutting into people … so long as they were dead.

He was fine separating and cataloging. He was fine examining and determining. It's when he actually had to put needle to skin and sew people back up—reassemble them after seeing them broken, implying that they _needed_ to be reassembled because their quality of life would be affected otherwise, which meant they were _alive_—that actually got him intensely nauseated.

His lethal nerves were the real reason he never would have made a good surgeon or anything else. That, and the sight of real, red, wet blood got him intensely sick, like the time he passed out cold when he was shadowing at a vet's office. They had to stitch up a dog after spaying it and accidentally clipped a very important vein. Blood went everywhere and Conrad went down. He had been young and his blood sugar had been low at the time, true, but the incident—the flash of bright red and then the impact of hitting the floor headfirst and waking up with a dented nose—would never leave him, and it spoke loudly of his mistrust of real people with real fresh-bleeding wounds.

Conrad knew he wasn't exactly doctor material, or even coroner material when it came down to it. He hardly knew any little kids who scribbled a picture of a corpse and a scalpel for Career Day at school, but it certainly wasn't him either. The whole thing was rather circumstantial and slightly unfortunate, really.

The moment he knew what he was going to be hit him at the tender and already-neurotic age of eleven, when his dad (drunk after his mother took him for another expensive and unnecessary MRI to explain the lump on the back of his neck that disappeared whenever doctors tried to look at it, which _might_ have been the last straw that led to the divorce) threw a bottle across the room and yelled at him that artists didn't have a pot to piss in and if he went off to some gay hippie 'college of design' like the Mattenson's son what the hell did he expect his parents to do, keep giving him money as he went on a slow slide into alcohol and drugs?

Conrad was going to be an artist, _maybe_, but he made a crushing 180 after that. Even the thought of being an artist — a free-loader, a loser — brought him to palpitations and sweaty palms, constantly reminded of his dad's screaming fit. He did whatever he could to keep his parents happy, until he realized they were always just going to be _unhappy_ no matter what. Then there was the whole gay thing, but by then his dad was already halfway across the country with a bleached-blond wife, so Conrad was self-assured enough at twenty-three to think it really wasn't any of his business.

He was paranoid of not having enough money to live off of, so he did what any shortage-obsessed and approval-desperate middle-class child did: tried for medical school. Somehow he made it (not quite sure how that happened, but it involved a lot of coffee and second-hand tests) and then he veered off into the most artistic avenue it offered … and the only one where the patients were already dead.

So what if it scared guys off of online dating profiles by the thousands? He had a nice apartment. Still got to draw some. And his patients never called him at one-am, probably because he was already with them.

Now Conrad Achenleck was slowly coming to terms with the fact he might just ... _attract dead things_ to him, as a rule.

"I can't. I just … I don't have any, you know… morphine, numbing stuff, anything," Conrad said in a near-whisper, shoulders climbing up to his reddening ears. He looked at the floor to avoid looking at that pathetically skinny green arm and the bone poking out of the—eugh. He shuddered. "I'll, uh, hurt him."

"It's alright," the Detective said, soothing words contrasting harshly with the uncertain stare he gave Hanna as he nudged the boy forward. "He says he doesn't feel anything much. He hardly flinched when it came off the first time. I think he'll go through a few pricks to have two arms again."

"Yeah. If I could control the other one and not have it attached like some remote control death arm, that would be okay, but I've already tried that and it doesn't work," Hanna volunteered softly, gaze drifting to the corpses on the tables like they were potted plants. He tilted his head. "Too bad."

"Yeah. Too bad," Conrad parroted helplessly, stomach taking a grand summersault.

His next breath was definitely going to be spent refusing to cooperate, but with the Detective staring at him like that (black eyes almost dewy but laced with Herculean emotional strength, like Conrad was his only hope to piece his little zombie pal back together), it was over before it started. It only took a few minutes of rustling around for a needle and medical twine before Hanna was on the table like a little kid at the doctor's. The absent swing of his skinny legs actually made Conrad wonder about how old he was. It was a fine thing to distract himself with as he turned the severed limb over in his gloved hands.

"How old is he? Hanna, I mean," he asked, still wondering over the _weirdness_ of the name—Hanna was _not_ a boy's name–as he fit the arm fragments together and made sure the bone was in the proper position. Ensured the medial and lateral epicondyles were properly oriented. Matched up the skin flaps as best he could.

He could see the tears in the waxy cartilage and absently diagnosed the break: the djinn or whatever it was had obviously swung Hanna around by his arm and it, like the Detective said, had just popped off. Lateral stress. But there were already stitches there, so it shouldn't have been too hard to do … He _hmm_ed a little, poking at it.

"Twenties. Early," the Detective said, leaning against another examination table and watching the whole affair with an intent stare.

"You're kidding," Conrad gulped, then froze when he saw the look the silent zombie was giving him. It was almost … resentful, like it wasn't the first time he had heard that, and his dead facial muscles remembered just enough of it to twist sourly. Conrad bent back to his sewing, wincing some from the whiz of the medical twine through green flesh. "You just, ah, look sort of young. Not _really_ young, just sort of."

In, out, in, out. It went that way for a while, repeatedly poking the thick needle through Hanna's soft, dry skin. Just looking at the tears and not the dead boy—_young man_—they were attached to, Conrad was able to expertly stitch up the arm so it would never fall off again. Maybe.

He was actually feeling rather accomplished with himself. It helped that Hanna didn't have any blood to spill, but all the nausea he had prevented came back with a vengeance when he looked over and noticed a blur of bright red on the Detective's light, tattered jeans. The older man turned away as if embarrassed, clapping a hand over his bleeding thigh with a muttered comment.

Conrad swallowed until he was sure he wasn't going to barf.

"So, ah… do I need to ask how the whole… genie thing went?"

"We got it to confess to killing James Maleck and then it tried to kill us so Heathcliff killed it instead and it brought the whole building down when it combusted," Hanna informed him, packing far too much deadpan information into one sentence for Conrad to cope with. The Detective looked distinctly uncomfortable and reached for Hanna in that classic 'I think we better spare Dr. Achenleck the details' way, but Conrad didn't need details this time.

"A building?" Conrad repeated, brow knitting before his mouth fell open sharply. "You? _You_ were the reason for the building collapsing?"

It had been all over the news, attacking Conrad from the moment he got in his car and turned on the radio and greeting him afresh when he got to the morgue. He had been feeling gross and gave it no more than a glance, but everyone at work was talking about how the abandoned housing project could have possibly collapsed after given the exact metric measurements of the truly impressive support columns. Fraud was suspected. The head of the project was demanding recompense. Again and again, they showed the ruins on every TV screen, dust and politicians still shifting restlessly around it… and that mayhem was the singular work of the two men in front of him.

Conrad couldn't breathe for a minute. Distant as the event was, the unheard collapse of tons of cheap concrete at three am still served as the connection that had been hovering for weeks: the link from what Hanna did to _the real world_, which he inhabited. It just required news reports and a panicked mayor to really sink in.

A housing project collapsed because a zombie and his human sidekick summoned a djinn and had a bloody battle to the death. Evil bats broke into apartments and chewed up favorite throw-pillows. Vampires walked the streets and gnomes lurked in pricey apartment gardens.

Fuck, there was probably a ghost in his favorite coffee shop.

Conrad suddenly had to lean on a bare examination table, legs wobbling. Why was he _seeing_ all of these things now that he had never seen before? How could all these people function in this world, walking past vampires and werewolves and shit and never realizing their lives were in danger? And it wasn't going away anytime soon. Hell, this was the way it had always _been_.

To his right, Hanna fixed him with a piercing aqua-blue gaze that said he knew exactly what was making him sweat.

"Half of it is awareness, Dr. Achenleck. It's like a haunting. Once you admit the possibility of supernatural activity, you give it power by accepting it. It grows in your mind and you lend it spiritual energy with your attention and negative energy, like fear or anxiety, and it gains the ability to harm you. Lots of people with no imagination are such strong unconscious disbelievers that they aren't susceptible even when it's right in front of them."

"And if I just… decide that it doesn't exist again?" Conrad demanded, wiping at his nose with a huge, wet and decidedly overwhelmed sniffle. "Go back to worrying about… hobos and serial killers and that kind of normal horrifying shit?"

"Few of us have that kind of control over our minds," Hanna said solemnly, then tilted his head again. "And you'll probably step on pixies all the time."

As nice of an escape as it sounded, Conrad knew immediately that he wouldn't be able to go back now that he had seen behind the curtain. In fact, the idea of walking through the dark streets and not being able to _see_ the bogies he knew existed terrified him. High-strung as he was, he would shut himself in after sunset and start attributing everything to ghosts, genies, fairies or … vampires. He winced. Vampires.

This was not going to be something he could dust off, especially when it kept visiting him in the middle of the night and leaving delicate pinprick souvenirs on his neck. And… a distinct aversion to sitting down, at least for today.

"If you don't count the angry construction workers, it went … alright, comparatively."

The Detective's deep, calm voice brought Conrad back to his morgue and his 'patient,' which was actually a good sight less terrifying than the inside of his own mind. There was a bright side to having Hanna and 'Imhotep' in his office: at least he knew someone was out there … dealing with it. The older man smiled like that word, _comparatively_, meant something else and put a big, bandaged hand on Hanna's shoulder.

"I just … well, finished it off before it could finish us off. Hanna did the rest. Spells and things. Plus we got out in time and … I'm alright and even Hanna seems fine. Maybe even better than before, as much as he's been talking."

"Are you sure?" Conrad asked hesitantly as he clipped off the last of the twine, hardly knowing why he said it until the Detective looked at him blankly.

Conrad didn't pride himself on being observant (he liked looking at the floor more than he liked looking at people), but that stare told him everything. The older man was obviously hoping that walking and talking meant healthy in zombie-land, or honestly trusted Hanna to let him know if anything was wrong with him. But how was the little zombie supposed to keep him informed if _he_ didn't even know how he worked? Hanna tested his newly-sewn arm with a little wiggle of his fingers as the older man watched with a buried anxiety.

Judging from his expression alone, the Detective wasn't ready to face the idea that something might be terribly wrong with Hanna on a level he couldn't physically see, and Conrad was enough of a doctor to know that that was a problem.

"I mean … how do you know something wasn't knocked loose? He can't feel much anyways, but there's got to be _some_ use for his veins and things and something might have happened when he was thrown. What if one of his—"

God, he was reaching here. _Yes, let's talk at length about things we don't understand to something we will never understand and worry a very handsome and busy man for no good reason. Good job, Dr. Achenleck, you asshole you_.

"You said he did a lot of magic last night. What if one of his spells messed with one of the spells that's keeping him alive? What if there was some kind of… interaction that he doesn't even know about, and it's causing magical decay?"

"All legitimate concerns," Hanna spoke up in the resulting silence, offering nothing more when both men looked at him worriedly. Conrad twirled his scalpel nervously around in his hands, taking another swipe at his nose as the Detective frowned deeply at his dirty boots.

"Who would we go to for something like that?" he asked, the difficulty of the thought showing on his handsome face. The coroner could see a world of silent threat presenting itself to the older man and it left solemn crows-feet at the corners of the Detective's dark eyes.

"Necromancer?" Conrad tried with only a little bit of hysteria, shrugging.

"A witch-doctor."

They looked over at Hanna again, who blinked for the first time that day.

"It's like going to a normal doctor. They can diagnose basic things, or tell you if you need to go to a specialist. Maybe one of them would be able to take a look at me and see if I'm bleeding magic or something."

Conrad's mouth puckered, a visible sign of _noticing shit_. Hanna _was_ different. Just a little, but he was different, and his speech-pattern was making Conrad believe more and more that he was just a twenty-something guy when he died. Was murdered. Whatever.

Fuck, that was young. Conrad grimaced then made himself nod.

"Sounds like a… good plan. You don't know anything about Hanna, really, and Hanna doesn't know anything either. It's about time you take him for a check-up. Maybe she can give you a manual or something. And maybe you can get a real witch-doctor who's also a real doctor and who knows how to sew," Conrad added a little too hopefully, brightening then wilting drastically when Hanna's partner gave him a relatively clueless look. Conrad put his gloved hands out helplessly. "I mean, I just—I don't know anything about zombies! I deal with the dead and unresponsive variety of corpse and pretty much destroy them in the process of finding out how they died, and I just don't trust myself with Hanna!"

"I trust you," the Detective said with a horrible faith that told Conrad this definitely wasn't going to be the last time this middle-of-the-night-arm-reattachment thing happened—and bad things might happen if something went wrong with Hanna.

"You really shouldn't," Conrad whined, proving himself correct by nicking himself on his scalpel and almost putting his dead-gore-covered finger in his mouth. He let out a wretched noise and threw it back in the pan, starting to peel off his ruined gloves just as the door to the morgue banged open.

Conrad acted on instinct an instinct alone, which for some strange but impressive reason found him _slamming_ Hanna flat on the table and snatching his scalpel back from the tray, turning his back on the one flash of broad shoulders and thick black caterpillar-mustache he caught in the doorway.

"Achenleck."

"Chief Lobinsnki!" he grit out, pushing Hanna's glowing eyes closed and turning around, where his boss was already giving the Detective an affronted stare. The thin man, painfully startled, attempted to simply blend into the hyper-clean chrome room by sheer blankness of expression, which didn't work in the slightest with his tattered and stained trench coat. When compared to Mr. Lobinski's navy button-down and police badge, the Detective looked like some kind of futuristic vigilante with an odd fetish for orange.

"What, uh, what are you … doing here?" Conrad asked, voice going high again. He palmed his scalpel from hand to hand, like he was trying to attract a pitbull's attention with a moving object. With Lobinski's squat build and monstrous jaw, the comparison wasn't that far off. "What are you _still_ doing here, I mean? You aren't here. Okay, you're _here_, but you're never here usually. Never … ever been here, actually; why are you here, again?"

"Who is this?" Lobinski demanded, pointing to the Detective, who actually looked like he was trying to hide in his trench-coat. The gleam of the Chief of Police's badge seemed to be making him especially nervous.

"Cousin," Conrad said too quickly. "Brought me dinner. Or came to tell me he couldn't. Haven't really gotten that far yet. Lots of interruptions. Can I help you, Mr. Lobinski?"

The middle-aged chief looked strangely at him, still three steps behind his rapid-fire speech, but at least his eyes were off of the Detective and … now far closer to the zombie on the counter. _Great_.

"Where's Dr. Romero?"

"Out," Conrad said, not particularly inclined to tell Lobinski that the head coroner was never actually _in_ and actually had a bit of a drinking problem that Conrad was content to leave him to because while he didn't mind being told what to do, he also liked quiet. Who cared if he got one paycheck for doing two jobs?

"Do you know when he'll be in?" the chief asked, obviously getting annoyed. Then he saw Hanna on the table and his brow furrowed. He took a cautious step towards the bundle of mismatched clothing. "Hell. Why is that one all wrapped up?"

"Just got him in, he was actually found in the rubble of the housing project," Conrad blurted out, flipping one of Hanna's many colorful scarves over his round face and plowing on with a sudden and awful breath that seemed to come to him on its own. "Which reminds me, Mr. Lobinski, I've been meaning to talk to you about the string of horrible, messy, awful mutilations that have been popping up lately because James Maleck—well, you don't know him, but he definitely wasn't the only one judging by the style of the lacerations and the public should probably be notified if people are disappearing and getting their eyes gouged out, it's only common courtesy and as Chief of Police it's your job to warn—"

"Christ, Achenleck, _Christ_," Lobinski snarled, meaty hands up as if to stop the incriminating flood of words. Shoulders stiff, he looked to the Detective with an overwhelmed expression, then glared back at the young coroner in a meaningful and threatening 'shut the hell up or it's your nametag' way. He yanked his button-down straight, hand skimming his gun-belt. "You just tell Romero to call me when he gets in. It can wait."

With one more glance at the Detective, he was gone.

The morgue door shut. Conrad's scalpel clattered to the floor. In the silence and safety that followed, the young coroner nearly passed out, steadied only by Hanna's ice-cold hand on his arm. It felt almost good against his feverish skin and he leaned into it before he thought about it.

His only thought was to get his boss—the boss of his boss of _his real boss_—out of this self-contained clusterfuck as soon as he could, and, knowing how shifty they were about the deaths they were keeping under wraps, blabbing about confidential material in front of a pedestrian was the only way to do that. Somewhere in him, Conrad was impressed at his own guts and quick thinking. Everywhere else was palpitating and sweating and demanding why the hell he was willing to risk his job for two insane drifters who drop-kicked him into their messy little world and _still_ expected him to stitch up any snapped-off body parts when the occasion arose.

God _damn_ it, when had it become so hard to tell the difference between idiocy and kindness?

Cowed and obviously intensely grateful, Hanna and the Detective quickly made their goodbyes and exited, slipping quietly into the evening. It was too sudden an ending to such a jarring experience, and knowing it would happen again just made it harder to settle down. His place of work empty, Conrad caught his breath and did little things—got new gloves, put a band-aid on his sliced finger, gathered dirty tools and put them in the gaping aluminum sink—until he could think again. He finished off the notes on Marina Pollock (normal blow to the head with a blunt object, thank god) and sat back in the comforting chrome silence. He sighed for a minute, twiddled his fingers, then figured he might as well just get on with his night because it wasn't as if anything _more_ stressful could happen and he was pretty much safe.

Conrad learned somewhat retroactively that he should never make such grand assumptions when he opened up the body-drawer of his next patient and pulled out the tray, hardly seeing the flash of fur and dingy white before the dead man's hand grasped his wrist and squeezed.

"'_Ey_."

"Fuck!" Conrad screamed, throwing himself away from the tray and crashing into an examination table, dropping to the floor and bonking his tailbone hard as fuck.

"Ooh, ooh, not so loud, puppy. Gotta hell of a hangover," the corpse hissed grimly, rolling over as Conrad scrambled back against the nearest examination table. One grayish taloned hand flopped off the tray, hanging just below the tattered puff of a fur cuff. "You ever heard'a knockin' firs'?"

"_You are not allowed here_," Conrad bellowed in the biggest whisper he could, heart exiting his throat with only the most obnoxious and painful squirmings known to man. His ass—oh god, there were no words for what his ass was going through right now. And, considering the abuse he had taken the previous night (that he was totally not thinking about), the single tear that slid down his nose was actually a masterful show of willpower.

And the creature that caused it was in his morgue. _Again_. Luce, now? Seriously, was this what his nights were going to be like from now on?

"Too bad," Luce muttered thickly, struggling to his elbows with a pained expression. "I was wasted so I, eh, rented a room. A coffin. Cubbey-hole thing. Figured I'd be here fer ya in the morning. Maybe get some breakfast in bed er summat, heh."

"Bet that's the first time you've ever done that," Conrad snapped back as he got to his feet, _ignoring the last part_, then flung an arm up to the blinking light in the corner of the morgue. "Jesus, what is wrong with you? How did you survive your first fucking _day_ as a vampire? I mean, do you ever even _think_ about what you do? If you snuck in here, you're definitely on all the video cameras!"

"Invisible, puppy. Fergot?"

"Your coat!" he burst out, apoplectic. "A coat, randomly coming in and opening doors!"

"Who the fuck is gonna admit they saw something like that?" Luce scoffed and turned over again, groaning to himself.

_Ah_, he mouthed. Conrad had always thought of supernatural entities ducking from the human populace, afraid of being discovered… but it was probably easier to rely on humans' inability to cope in most circumstances. Humans probably did half of the video-erasing _for_ them out of pure fear. Conrad suddenly felt a little faint.

Or maybe that was because he'd had both a vampire and a zombie in his morgue at precisely the same moment that his boss was sniffing down his collar. Jesus.

"You—can vampires even have hangovers?" Conrad asked incredulously, absolutely _not_ thinking about the previous night except that Luce hated being asked shit like that and he wanted Luce _very_ uncomfortable right now.

"My undead liver says yeah, and he's kinda callin' the shots right now," the vampire muttered into his hand, then fell back onto the metal tray with a despondent thump, his arm over his eyes. "Awwwww fuck."

He just lay there like … well, like a dead man. Conrad just huffed and squinted _through his broken glasses_, glaring up at the video camera and knowing he had a fuck ton of erasing to do tonight. He found himself watching Luce's thin chest and the way it _wasn't_ rising or falling. Then he ducked to get a Kleenex and quietly, surreptitiously blew his nose, not wanting to admit that Luce was right about the whole-

"Yer sick, arentcha."

"_No_," he said without thinking, feeling like a third-grader. Then he blew again and said, surly, "Just allergies."

"Why're you so hung up on provin me wrong, peaches?" Luce grumbled, sounding exhausted. "I know my shit."

"You don't know shit," he muttered back, going to _lock the door_ before anybody else came in and outed him as a supernatural sympathizer. Who was also kind of screwing a vampire but would like a little more warning next time it happened.

Shit. _Shit_. Not thinking about it. And… definitely not thinking about next times.

"I know my shit and your shit, so quit bitchin. "

"Did you hear that whole conversation we had?" Conrad said loudly, trying to change the subject and get out of whatever inane back-and-forth Luce had started.

"Yeh. Specially the bits about myeahyeamyea and murmurfurmurmyer." The vampire gave him a withering glance. "Naw. Real inconsiderate to dead folk, these things, totally soundproofed. Also colder'n a witches tit, the hells with that."

"They're supposed to be for preserving bodies, not for overnight stays," Conrad snapped. "That was the Detective and Hanna. Thought that might be of interest to you."

"Might get me out of yer hair, ya mean."

Luce preened and sat back on the body-drawer like it was a sun-bed, as if knowing he deeply annoyed Conrad was a point of personal pride for him. He seemed to be recovering a bit of almost-color to his grey skin, which was incredibly hard to see and even harder to be happier about if it meant a cheekier Luce.

"That too," Conrad sighed, and told him everything.

He condensed everything about the altercation with the djinn and about Hanna perking up slightly and lingered on how they (he, the Detective, maybe Hanna) still wanted to get him checked out. The young coroner hardly knew how to phrase half of it, not wanting to admit full subscription to this crap but still not wanting to seem like an ignorant idiot in front of Luce. When he finished, leaving a trailing sentence about finding a witchdoctor, Luce just rolled over and nodded.

"You want Monty," he concluded immediately, scratching behind his ear with the beleaguered concentration of a flea-bitten dog.

"Monty is a … witchdoctor?"

"Monty is Monty," the vampire said with a grin. A really, really _fond_ grin. Conrad tapped his foot, looking severely unimpressed (and a little spooked) until Luce shrugged again.

"He's a contracter'a sorts. Supplier. A five-way intersection fer the buried supernatural highways, an' you kin imagine the sorta crashes that leads to. He'll git ya hooked up with a witch-doctor in no time, you just gotta find 'im. Too bad y'aint a girl, you could just flutter yer pretty little eyelashes and he'd bend over backwards for you."

Luce glanced up at him, squinting in the harsh morgue lights.

"Eh, may as well try anyways. Monty likes his girlies fat-bottomed and you got that goin' strong."

"Shut up," Conrad said tiredly, pale face pressed to the back of his gloved hand. Yawning and lazily flashing his narrow fangs in the process, Luce motioned for pencil and paper. Conrad passed him a notepad, not noticing the suddenly acute flash of the vampire's red eyes as he inspected the coroner's clean blue gloves before touching them.

Conrad was looking at the wall impatiently, listening to Luce scribble away, when the sound stopped and Luce's hand was on his wrist. He pulled away instinctively, protesting, but the vampire tossed his pen aside and peeled off his examination glove, sniffing twice before making a huffing noise. One brow drifted up.

Conrad's hands always got sweaty under the gloves: the band-aid had come off and blood was smeared across the earlier scalpel cut, mixing feathery with his sweat. Before he could say anything, Luce slid his sliced thumb into his mouth and sucked, making a jolt of surprise go straight to the coroner's locked knees. Conrad lost his breath as the dead man's tongue circled the cut, a look of concentration on his unshaven face, teeth pressing gently. It was another second before Conrad realized Luce had let go of his wrist but his thumb was still in the man's cool, cool mouth.

Stunned and blasted with memories of the previous night, he pulled away a little; Luce bent forward an inch and harmlessly nipped his knuckle, red eyes amused and radiating that _thing_ that made Conrad tight in his chest and incapable of looking away.

"Maybe you would'a been better off as an artist, eh Connie," Luce murmured against his finger, then cackled so nastily it made Conrad jump, hands immediately snapping to his side defiantly. As if the little taste had been just what he needed, Luce hopped off the body tray and stretched, groaning and moaning like the hedonist he was. After rescuing Luce's scrap of paper from the floor (and breathing at least four times), Conrad looked over at his undead harasser grimly.

"Why don't you do this yourself? You want to see Hanna back in one piece. You can even, like, catch him. He _just left_."

"'Cos I got things ta do, puppy. I'm on an _investigation_," Luce whispered dickishly, then straightened his coat and went for the door in a way that clearly said he was done, thank you.

Conrad certainly wasn't done. The conspicuous pain in his ass, less so.

"So are you going to give me a way to reach you or just keep popping in at your leisure?" Conrad called after him louder than he had to, like he could chase away the Luce-induced headache gnawing at the base of his skull.

It wasn't like he wanted to call him and chat about Desperate Housewives. Mostly he just wanted some sort of _control_ over this fucking situation, and maybe if he called Luce and gave him updates, maybe he wouldn't wake up to find him in his bed again. Although that hadn't exactly ended _badly_, a small and greedy part of his mind suggested in a piercing voice. He grimaced it away, along with any (very, very fresh) flashes of being pressed against an alley wall. Bad thoughts bad thoughts bad thoughts.

"I'm gonna go and let you 'magine the answer ta that one," came Luce's gravelly drawl as he tugged at the door, then flipped the lock. The vampire didn't even look back before striding out and into the station and the night beyond with a flash of white coat, leaving Conrad alone with his work.

Which really, honestly pissed Conrad off because trying not to think about the fact that Luce had done unmentionable things to him in an alleyway just twenty-four hours previous made it kind of impossible not to think about, and this just wasn't the kind of morning-after he was fucking used to, even if he only had two to compare it to and this just sort of really sucked. In between being really fantastic.

Which he wasn't ready to admit to yet, so it was probably better that the undead asshole just left. Without a word about last night. After annoying him to death. Right.

"Right," Conrad said to no one in particular, sighing and looking at the slanted scribble in his hand. "Right."

Oh well. Lucky he never went to bed early anyways. Not tonight either, with the amount of time that he spent laying in bed, staring at his perfectly healed thumb, once again trying to decide whether Luce was just a greedy insufferable asshole or somewhat nice while also being an insufferable mostly-greedy asshole.

'Wait and see' had never sounded so daunting to him.


	7. Regarding Your Ad

A/N: LAMOHHHHHHNT. I love the twist in Luce and Lamont's history. One chapter will be a little bunch of snippets from Lamont's POV, just to flesh those two out even if I don't have grand plans for the Italian Stallion at the moment. The WorthMont friendship, no matter how effed up by age differences, cannot go un-elaborated.

Lamont is one of those characters that I love but I don't quite know how to write him yet, so, forgive me any discrepancies with your own characterization canon D: B-but I still love this Lamont. A lot.

_Warnings: language, Hard Reality Checks, actually no sexy stuff? AGAIN what._

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Regarding Your Ad

* * *

The very next night found Conrad Achenleck in another alleyway, looking for a third door to the right.

He'd set out with little more than a bottle of water and a wallet and thus far was still in possession of both, despite some skeevy glances from passersby. He walked the entire way with the little scrap of paper in front of him, like a flimsy white beacon that would lead him through the very _worst_ part of town. The coroner was expecting a password or puzzle or something to find this 'Monty,' if just because Luce never missed a chance to mess with him, but the directions were actually incredibly simple when he ignored the fact that the undead asshole's scribble was a stone's throw away from totally illegible.

He followed the street-names all the way into an unlit alley, cautiously tried what he thought was the third door, found it locked, then double-checked and moved down to the _real_ third door. It wasn't until he opened the very heavy, very suspicious third metal door in the dark, smoky alleyway that he thought to himself, wait. Wait just a second.

Why was he here, again? Why hadn't he just hung onto the paper scrap until the Detective swung by his work again and gave it to him then? Why wasn't he at home watching late night TV like a normal functioning member of society, for god's sake?

Part of him said the two detectives already had too much to do. He would take care of this one little thing for them: like it or not, Conrad was starting to feel inexplicably _involved_ in this weird, dangerous quest for Hanna's health or safety or memory or death. Plus, Luce had kind of … entrusted him with this. The way he spoke, he clearly wanted him to go talk to this Monty character. And the vampire wanted Hanna back to normal, too, so this wasn't a trap or a trick. Maybe Conrad went because he honestly didn't have anything else to do and knew it wouldn't be much trouble, or at least not the kind that left you pulseless. Luce knew this guy, even though that really wasn't any assurance of his good character.

Or maybe it was because this guy knew Luce, and Conrad was just beginning to realize in the darkest, quietest corners of his mind how utterly stupid it was to carry on a … bloody, hyper-sexual, stalkery _not-thing _with a creature of the night he knew absolutely nothing about — especially when even Luce's holey reflection didn't make him come to terms with the word _vampire_ in any way that mattered.

Selflessness or anxiety found him stumbling into the dingy room behind the third door to the right, tripping on the raised door-frame and almost falling, then whirling dizzyingly when it slammed behind him. Something clicked and Conrad had just enough time to pray that it wasn't a lock before someone spoke.

"Can I help you?"

Conrad whirled again and blinked. The source of the deep male voice was younger than most and handsome in a dark, distinctly European way. He was also thick enough to be a bouncer and he looked horribly conspicuous sitting alone at the peeling desk, carrot-stick fingers hovering above his laptop keys. The man's wrists and neck were thicker than anyone's had a right to be and a fine sheen of black hair covered his bare arms despite the aching cold in the cavernous… Conrad supposed _office_ was the right word. The little emaciated tree at the corner of the desk didn't really do much for atmosphere, but the gesture was clear. There was even an abstract poster up on the wall, even if it was only to cover the massive crack underneath it.

"Uh. I'm looking for a man named Mon—" Conrad grinned wretchedly and squinted at the paper scrap through his cracked glasses, which was hard to do with his hands shaking. "Er, Lamont Toucey."

"That'd be me," the man said easily, closing his laptop and leaning back on his chair like a father reclining in front of Thanksgiving football. "Who are you and where'd you get my name from?"

Conrad stared, not quite willing to say yet, but found himself wondering about another facet of this strange world he'd found himself in. Lamont Toucey seemed a little… nonchalant for someone who dealt with creepy-crawlies all the time. Then again, maybe it was a defense mechanism. Couldn't get all worked up all the time over every single murderous fanged-tentacled-cursed creature that came to buy something from you, right?

"Conrad. Achenleck. I just… uh… heard that you'd be able to… help me," Conrad muttered uncomfortably, one hand going to his hair. He tried to convince himself to step away from the door, with poor results: three steps forward, one step back and eyes on the floor. "With a problem I have…"

"You have a script?" Lamont prompted him, receiving a blank stare in return for his jargon. Conrad swallowed. Luce hadn't told him about this part, so he just kept staring in the hopes that the man would give him something else to work with.

"A sire, then."

The larger man's 'of course' gesture was received with another round of petrified gaping. Lamont's handsome face creased in a frown as the concrete silence stretched on, a siren winding up outside. At length, the big man scooted out his chair and got to his feet, giving strength to his thick reclining form: relatively frightening strength that Conrad had time to ponder in full as Lamont started walking towards him very, very slowly.

"If you don't have a script or a sire, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave," he said in a pleasant, smiling, how's-your-sister way that was nonetheless totally terrifying and Conrad re-realized that he was in a fucking _alleyway_ and what kind of person sets up shop in a fucking _alleyway_ if they didn't deal in crack and abortions and shit and _shit_ did he not think this through?

"Luce!" Conrad burst out, hands up like he was warding off an italian demon. "Luce sent me for something really fucking important so you can't kill me or shiv me or whatever!"

That stopped Lamont Toucey dead in his tracks. His mouth fell open a little, then closed. One impressive brow popped up.

"You mean Worth," he clarified, posture suddenly arrested as he looked Conrad up and down like he was an entirely new creature. Conrad didn't like it. At all.

"Worth?" he rasped weakly, staring at Lamont like a dead fish as terror ran rampant through his every abused vein. Did this man even _know_ Luce? He could feel his field of vision starting to seriously weave and was struck anew by the terrifying possibility of what would happen to him if he passed out here. As in, a kidney was probably going to be the least of his losses and he was still _sick_, damnit, he shouldn't have to go through this!

Regardless of the stress on his heart, Conrad's paleness and unresponsiveness produced a desired effect. Lamont, obviously realizing the strange and prissily-dressed man in his office was either terrified or just plain stupid but by all means definitely not a cop, crossed his arms and sighed.

"Describe him for me."

Conrad's dry mouth popped open. Oh Christ, where did he start?

"He's a—he's really fucking terrifying is what he is. With these _teeth_ and this _coat_… looks like he hasn't bathed in years," he rattled off, gesturing frantically. He talked faster and faster as they finally got onto a subject he _knew_: the thing that had terrorized him for the past month, who he just realized he'd been waiting desperately to _tell someone else about _and not be locked up afterwards. "His eyes, they're red, like we're talking fucking candy-apple red, and he has some sort of accent that's really fucked up. And he's a dick. God, he's the hugest dick—"

"He _has_ the hugest dick?" Lamont repeated, expression dubious and, god forbid, a little playful.

"_Is. Is. Is the hugest dick_," Conrad nearly screeched, because after all he hadn't actually _seen_ it, just felt it and well it was nothing to scoff at, or even nod at and really it was kind of perfect and—Christ, the bastard cracked his glasses and boned him in an alley, how could he find it in himself to wax poetic about his dick?

"Yep, that's Worth." Lamont smiled in what Conrad guessed was relief, which really didn't do much to make Conrad himself feel much better. The supernatural contractor crossed his arms and reclaimed the five threatening steps he'd taken to lean back against his desk, which actually _did_ make Conrad feel better. A little.

"Luce? Worth?" the coroner gasped, hellishly confused.

"Yeah, Luce Worth."

"Oh," he said dumbly, and silence did a tap-dance on the man's fucking desk before Lamont inclined his hand toward the threadbare chair in front of his work station.

"Alright. Worth sent you. You said you needed help with something. Does that mean you actually do, or Worth was too lazy to come himself?"

The way he said it was strange, as if Luce had never sent a messenger before now. Stunned by how quickly this man was willing to just _get on with _things (again, probably an occupational trait_)_, Conrad shakily took the chair and fell into it, running a hand over the back of his sticky neck.

"It's for me. M-my, uh, my friend is looking for someone who can…" He realized he was dropping the word _friend_ like it was a tacky cover-up for his own little-dead-boy-whose-limbs-fall-off problem, so he shook his head and grit his teeth. _Committed to speaking the perverse truth in front of a total stranger._ "We've got this zombie. And we need to know if he's okay."

"Having a worm problem or is he getting a little frothy at the mouth?" Lamont asked mildly, smiling again. The man smiled _way_ too much for the filthy alley around him. Conrad laughed nervously.

"Neither and uh, no, thank god. Just think of it as a … thousand-mile checkup. There'd be cause for alarm if he tried to start biting people or uh, r-rotting, maybe. And we'd rather get the 411 before that happens."

"Smart." 'Monty' bent and pulled out a drawer, round face turning pensive as he carded through thick, dirty-edged manilla folders. "Sounds like you need a witchdoctor."

"I do?" Conrad said faintly, as if surprised to realize he was still sitting there.

"Or something like it."

After a bit of digging, Lamont straightened with a pleased _ah-ha_ noise and calmly copied out a few lines of contact information from a manilla file. Then he passed a business card to Conrad with a few directions, simple as that—except it wasn't that simple, because when Conrad threw him a sparse, oh-god-so-grateful-can-I-leave-now smile and went to take it from him, he ended up just tugging on it. Because Lamont's thick fingers weren't letting go.

It took him two more dumb tugs and a constant friendly smile from 'Monty' before Conrad went _oh_ really stupidly and dug in his pocket for his wallet. He grabbed a fifty before he could think about it (he briefly thought of getting the Detective to pay him back but instantly banished it: those two were too skinny and at least one of them still ate stuff) and made the hand-off. His first illegal transaction was complete: he got the business card and Lamont tucked the fifty into his pocket with a pleased nod.

"He's an interesting kid," Lamont said thoughtfully as Conrad got up, head tilting in a way that immediately told the coroner that he was much more than that. "Has some of the craziest teeth I've ever seen, but he's good at what he does. Only one in the city for what you have, too."

"Definitely not the… craziest," Conrad eked out of nowhere, voice cracking. He didn't really realize what he was doing until Lamont looked at him curiously. Conrad should have been thanking him and running for the very suspicious metal door, but instead the young coroner cleared his throat, tapping the card against his palm. "I mean, you know… Luce."

He dropped the name like the bomb it was. There was whistling, but no explosion: Lamont gave an amused 'different kind of crazy' hand-gesture and chuckled, turning back to his laptop in the _I'm done here_ way. It was the second time that week someone had pulled that shit on him, and, once again, Conrad most certainly was _not_ done.

This was the real, honest reason he was here. Not really only to help the zombie, although he never claimed altruism as one of his strong points. He was here to ask questions. His entire body clenched in crazy fear, or maybe just anticipation of being delivered from this clueless haze he'd been swimming in for the past forever.

"You do? Know him, don't you?"

A nod was his only answer. Conrad's stomach did a weird little flop.

"Does he use you?" He winced. Dammit, that was too obvious to even be Freudian. "What do you do for him, I mean?"

"Stuff all over the board, really. I supply him with blood-bags every so often. Worth isn't the type to need them, but emergencies always happen."

Lamont shrugged and smiled, letting slip a little flicker of what Conrad could see as an almost _dangerously_ easy-going nature.

"How did you meet him?"

"Ahahaha. Aha. There's a story," he said lamely, tugging at his shirtsleeve. "We go way back, guess you'd say."

After another weird, off-key giggle escaped his mouth, Lamont looked at him. Conrad looked at Lamont. When it became clear that Conrad wasn't going to be leaving him in peace anytime soon, the older man shrugged and knit his hands together in front of his wide chest.

"I was, uh, nine. I was tossing the baseball around with some friends and it went into an alley. Lived in a bad part of town. Round the corner from here, actually, heh. I went in to get it and Worth was standing there like a … hehehe, some kind of pimp from hell with my ball under his foot. Hahah. Heh. Still had that coat. Think he's had it since the seventies. I knew he was a vampire the second I saw him. I've always had a … you know."

A stunted gesture to his temple apparently meant 'sixth sense', or maybe just 'two fucking eyeballs.'

"I got scared, but I really loved that ball, so… ehehe… I took my bat and whacked him in the shin, heh, and ran off with it. He was drunk out of his mind, I think, but I guess he was sober enough to be impressed. So he tailed me just enough to, hahah, you know, scare the piss out of me, then checked up on me every few years after that. Heh. Or maybe when he remembered, which still made it every three years or so. 'Course, his version of checking up on me was staging some sort of elaborate way to spook me. I didn't go out after dark for the longest time. Made me the lamest high-schooler ever, I think. I used to think he was some sort of delusion of mine: real life boogey man."

Lamont shrugged his thick shoulders like it was all water under the bridge, when Conrad had managed to earn himself seven years of therapy _without_ a vampire stalker.

"Weird story, but not the weirdest."

Luce … getting drunk and torturing nine-year-olds? And stalking them for the rest of their lives afterwards, just because they were terrified enough to try and fight him and that was a _good thing_? Conrad had guessed that the vampire was insane, but now he _knew_ it, just like he knew that Luce didn't have real friends and was still waiting for an opportunity to prove it.

"So you were… friends?" Conrad ventured, still colossally hung up on how _fucked up_ Luce was.

"Aha, no, not yet. Not then, anyways. Not now, even, if you're looking for people you call up for lunch. Okay, hehhehehe, definitely not if you… heh, yeah." Lamont chuckled weakly and looked to the side, tapping his chin. "Didn't really get to know him until … uh…"

"Until?" Conrad asked before he could stop himself, not really noticing how much he was being horribly nosy and invasive. It was the first time Lamont had looked _hesitant_ the entire time and part of him leapt on that.

"I caught him with my girlfriend at the time," Lamont confessed after a painful-sounding clearing of his throat.

"Fuck. What did you do?" Conrad asked after a long pause, having a very clear impression of everything that could mean, all of which fit Luce. His voice was hushed even though they were utterly alone. Hell, no one would probably hear him _scream_ down there, which wasn't as scary a thought as it should have been because he sort of trusted Lamont in a weird way, even after just ten minutes with him. Lamont shook his head with a weak smile.

"I beat the shit out of him," he said simply. "He'd already bitten into her, so he was in that haze—you know, that haze that vampires get into—so it was a pretty poor fight, but I won't lie, it felt fantastic. After that, he decided I was his best friend. Got me into this office and everything. Like some kind of, hehe, demonic Santa Claus. You just have to beat him up to get presents. And stay on his good side, even if you never know where it is."

He finished with another nervous laugh, patting his wide chest. Conrad got a sneaking impression _why_ Luce was so keen on Lamont and got a little horribly unnerved at how Lamont … wasn't unnerved. He was about to pipe up and mention _hey you know Worth or Luce or whatever, that vamp guy that hangs around, you know he sort of gets off when people punch him or slice him with a scalpel and you should watch that because it hasn't always turned out the best for me_ but the supernatural contractor cut him off.

"You got a question about him?" Lamont asked in that friendly _Iknowwhatyou'rethinking_ way, looking a little curious himself. Conrad blinked and rubbed at the back of his neck, trying to think up something to say before the other man asked how he knew Luce.

"You're his… friend. Sort of. Why doesn't he—"

_Think, think, think. What do you really want to know?_

"Has he ever asked to, ah, bite you?"

Sudden as hell, Lamont started laughing loudly, hand gravitating to the back of his thick neck. He laughed and laughed for at least half a minute, pitch weaving and getting higher and higher before he cleared his throat again and ducked his rosy face. Conrad, who by now had grasped that the compulsive giggling was a nervous habit, was suddenly very, very uncomfortable.

"Ahhah. Ah. Well. _Never_. I mean, there might have been… haha. Ahahaha. Heh. I'd never let Worth near my neck." Lamont took a deep breath, making another vague hand-gesture. "He sorta has a reputation."

"For what?" Conrad half-whispered, paling instantly. Lamont winced, which made his stomach crumple further.

"Sorta... ripping people apart," he muttered, squinting at a crack in the office wall.

Complete silence followed his answer. Something, a broken pipe or a faucet, dripped a room away. Seeing Conrad's wide-eyed stare, Lamont shook his head, waving his hand like he was brushing away a _misunderstanding_ but Conrad couldn't fucking see how there could be a misunderstanding about _ripping people apart_. It had a verb and a noun and even an adverb. An inhumanly huge shiver started to build in him that was cruelly trapped by Lamont's next string of explanations.

"I'm sure it's only happened once or twice over the decades — Worth is smart, damn smart — but word like that travels. Vampires are a pretty close-knit culture even if they're all loners. Worth's like the _loner_ of loners, and sort of a … mutt, at that. Mutant. He's not dangerous to people who know him, but he's not the type to get a blood doll even if he wanted one. No one would touch him. Plus he gets a pretty bad rep for drinking from way too many people when he feeds. Vampire culture counts on subtlety to stay hidden and Worth's not very good at that. So… yeah, there's way worse vamps out there, but he's, heh, not exactly a family favorite."

The man looked at him and smiled again, popping the cork on the awful oily feeling that had been simmering in Conrad since he walked in.

"Why do you want to know?"

Conrad stared. He stared, put the business card in his pocket, and that was as far as he remembered. He might have bowed out and said something like _oh, okay then, no reason and well thank you for your time and see you later_, but there was also the chance he just kept staring, then turned around and left. He didn't remember a single street on the way back, just smears of wet black concrete.

When he got home, he locked all the doors and windows and didn't get to sleep until four am.


	8. A Quiet So Loud

A/N: ConWorth is for sex, Hanna… is for brain-melting adorableness.

Again, I play GalaHanna as platonic, because I adore how intensely the two care for each other and think it's beautiful left alone. When it goes sexual, I usually get creepycrawlies on my skin and click X. But you can imagine deep feelings of longing building in the Detective's loins if you really want to, because god knows there's enough material here. Your choice.

Yeah, doesn't sound so awesome when I put it like THAT, huh? I work in subtle ways. Plus Hanna is the mental equivalent of a coked out ten-year-old right now, so I don't really think that's kosher fap-material for older men. Maybe.

HAAAAH I'M IN UR HEAD INFLAMIN UR GUILTS I'll shut up now.

_Warnings: Nothing. Not… even… language? Gllk, Detective is too damn wholesome. Wait, I've got it, I've got it. Strong chance of diabetes, this chapter is not doctor recommended (as in, Worth would hate it and spit on it and grrrr)._

Dedicated to my lovely beta, RaeHimura, because she deserves it and also she needs fluff to breathe.

* * *

A Quiet So Loud

* * *

Sunday night came, slow and sleepy, and he still didn't want to go out.

He knew he had things to do. People to look for, ads to answer. The two investigators had gotten quite a few phone calls over the past week and the messages sat on the Detective's cell phone, blinking at him, but the cracked and peeling walls of the older man's shoddy apartment enclosed the two of them like an old book he didn't want to leave. Even the mold spots were somewhat comforting in the weak yellow light from the kitchen.

Admittedly, he was still pretty shaken by the almost-incident in the morgue. He would say he was lucky not to be recognized by Lobinski, since they worked in the same building, but there was no reason a paper-pusher would have any contact with the Chief of Police. The older man had learned that he honestly seemed to fade right out of people's minds after he left the room, but if the Chief saw him later at the station, there might be questions. He might have to become Conrad's cousin for quite a while, and he didn't know whether he was up to the task of acting it out. He wasn't very good at deception, even if his experiences with it were limited.

The Detective was one of the few who had the luxury of complete self-honesty: he didn't have any memories to work from or any self-imposed expectations to fulfill, so he simply _was himself_ without exception. It was both a gift and a curse.

Lobinski crashing their supernatural party, in essence, disturbed Hanna's partner and made him re-realize that, to do what they did, a whole lot of dodging and luck was required. The look he had given Dr. Achenleck in the morgue shared that inherent anxiety, but the wonderful thing was, Conrad hadn't sold them out or even begun to. He was more than on the 'rolling with the punches' side of the fence, it looked like he was on their side. As in, buying real estate on their side. Thank god.

The Detective also wondered if the man wasn't … a little attracted to him. Maybe it was just Conrad's way, but he tended to bluster a bit and turn red when he spoke to him. Not that it mattered; the Detective just liked to know these things. And be prepared for any polite refusals.

Still, part of his mind—fine, most of his mind – still worried over what the coroner had said. Neither of them knew anything about Hanna, much less how he remained walking and what might interfere with that, _much_ much less his higher functions. The Detective hadn't been willing to accept that as a threat, but right now they were blind leading the blind… squared. Especially concerning matters of undead health. Now that the thought had been planted, something would have to be done. Soon.

"Hanna?"

His silent, dusty partner turned towards him on the collapsing couch; the direct blaze of Hanna's eyes was enough of an affirmative. The Detective scrubbed at his messy black hair, just looking at the slight young man curled against the arm-rest. Hanna looked exactly the same as he always did, which was neither a good nor a bad thing. He sighed.

"Do you think anything is wrong with you?"

"I don't know," Hanna answered after a long pause. Scribble-laden journal open on his lap, he traced one of the cracks in the ceiling with his glowing eyes, like they were searchlights and there was someone trapped in the crack that he needed to help. His voice was soft and hollow. "I don't really have anything to compare it to. Maybe everything I feel is wrong right now. Or there is no right if you're dead. I don't know."

The zombie's wandering, detached tone struck the Detective in a way he was too tired to really think about: he just let the hopeless feeling wash over him and through his creaking bones, leaving him so much heavier than before. He had no idea where to find a witchdoctor. He had no idea where to even start, honestly, and the night seemed so vast and dangerous at the moment, even if there was one less djinn in it.

He didn't even want to think about what was said that night, or what it implied for the entire world.

"I don't want to take on any more jobs until we know you're okay," he said grimly, voicing the decision he'd made pretty much the moment they exited Dr. Achenleck's workplace. They couldn't risk anything more, especially if Hanna could start coming apart at his seams. Hanna stared at him like he so often did, expression unchanged except in angle when the Detective answered the small, niggling urge to touch his tiny partner: namely, reaching out and messing with the side of Hanna's head, fluffing his bright red curls. "Okay?"

"Not even the small ones?"

"You really don't like being cooped up, do you," he murmured to himself; or it might as well have been, because Hanna's only answer was another tilt of his head. They sat in silence for a moment, then Hanna rustled around in his supremely ordered, efficient, _dead_ fashion, tucking his legs under himself like he was folding up a chair.

"I wouldn't do the jobs without you, Marmaduke," Hanna said, then shrugged his tiny shoulders. "It wouldn't be fun that way. It keeps me busy. Gives me less time to think."

"And thinking is bad?" the Detective asked, surprised and even a little excited about the shrug: it was a new gesture he had never seen before. As more and more nights passed, it was almost like he could see new joints being added to Hanna's stiff form, giving him more mobility.

In that moment, Hanna's mouth became almost surly or grim, or maybe even a little surprised that the sentiment had slipped out. His expression edged on consternation, assuming it was even an expression at all and not just a random convulsion of dead muscle tissue. Finding himself trying to split hairs, the Detective sighed and sat back on the couch, content to lay there with his hand over his eyes.

He should have guessed he wasn't going to get an answer for that one and he was all right with that. It was early, still. They had time to figure themselves out. He heard the couch creak and Hanna walk off, maybe to disappear into the apartment corners or into his journal piles.

He let himself drift until soft, squeaking noises approached the couch.

"Edison?"

He looked up, groaning some. Hanna was standing in front of him, dull yellow light from the kitchen striking his emaciated form in a way that made the Detective immediately want to feed him or give him a home or something hyper-protective like that. His jeans were huge, with a patch on the knee; a limp yellow t-shirt with a huge star on the front flapped around him like a tent, green arms sticking out like bones. Nothing fit, least of all his skin tone, but Mrs. Blaney had donated all of his old clothes to charity so they'd been forced to scrounge around at second-hand shops.

The Detective actually let Hanna pick out his own clothes (after wrapping him up in multiple layers to avoid detection), but the shirts the young zombie mutely placed in his hands were fantastically awkward or looked like they'd come out of the little girls' section. They were always brightly colored and always too big. The Detective routinely gave his partner a three-second warning — an 'are you sure' chance to go back and get real twenty-something-year-old-man clothes like polos or maybe sweaters — but Hanna just stared back until the older man sighed and bought him the shirt with the fat orange dinosaur.

If it made him happy, why not? He hardly knew what Hanna's style was like before he died or if this was a derivation or a perversion of it, but he just wished people wouldn't look at him like _he_ dressed Hanna. It was just plain uncomfortable, especially since Hanna didn't need the help looking like he was twelve and wandering around with a thirty-year-old.

"What is it?" he asked sleepily, rubbing the heel of his palm into his dry eyes.

"What's this?" Hanna asked, holding up a battered DVD case. A blurry grey shape sat below a wiggly fifties-style title, only claiming seven letters.

The Detective smiled. He had gotten everything secondhand even before Hanna came into his life and the DVD was … well-loved was the term he preferred. He made himself sit up, even with exhaustion gnawing at his muscles. The movement made his healing thigh sting a little.

"That's uh, an old movie. It's called The Blob."

Hanna's intent stare told him quite clearly that was not enough information. The Detective scrounged around in his memory — it was quite empty but he hadn't had much time to watch movies lately — and tried again.

"It's uh … it's about this mutant jelly blob that gets life zapped into it and it goes around eating things really, really slowly. It's sort of funny. The slowness, at least. The people — the ones who are going to get eaten — they scream for so long, it just gets … ridiculous."

Hanna absorbed the information and ghost-frowned down at the case, like he was inches away from using the dry supernatural library inside of his head and making some sort of argument as to _how_ the blob could have gotten possessed. The Detective waved his hands, a little more concerned than he would admit about stressing Hanna's undead brain.

"No one would find it scary now, but I picked it up anyways. Doesn't really matter. I like having old movies around."

"Can we watch it?" Hanna asked in his softest voice after a minute, holding it perfectly still in his hand.

"Uh," his partner said uncertainly. He was a little shocked by the request, and wrapped up in that syllable was a glance towards his dark, rumpled bed, because he really did have to go to work early the next day. Hanna, observant as a knife is sharp, nodded immediately. The single movement was like a gavel falling, it was so final.

"It's okay," he said quietly, but there was some buried _flicker_ in his small body, a slowing of his formerly static eyes and mouth, that hit the older man right below his kidneys. It told him that Hanna didn't want to watch the movie alone: the 'we' wasn't just because he happened to be in the room. It was 'we' because it was 'not without you'.

His breath caught.

Hanna was changing. He really was. Maybe something really had been knocked loose when they fought the djinn. But maybe, just maybe, it was something good and they needed the witchdoctor to knock it all the way loose so that Hanna could become a little more like the horribly lonely, painfully brave boy locked in his laptop.

"No, no. No. I can watch it with you," he protested, half-rising from the couch in his hurry to stop the dead young man from retreating into a shadowed corner for the rest of the night. The Detective gave a lame smile, pushing his hair back. "I just can't promise I won't fall asleep."

Hanna stared at him. Hard. The Detective tried to imagine the thoughts going through his head and simply couldn't, but in the end, his partner popped open the DVD case anyways.

"That's okay. You need sleep," the tiny zombie said in that way that meant he didn't really understand the basic concept but was willing to go along with it for his sake. Hanna, gracious even when uncomprehending.

With that, Hanna went and fetched the laptop — Hanna's own, it had the larger screen that told him the old Hanna had probably really liked watching movies — and plunked himself next to his partner on the moth-bitten couch. They set the machine on the Detective's knees because they were farther away and started up the DVD. Once the spotty black and white feed got going, only the Detective leaned back into the sagging cushions and sighed.

The zombie remained at strict attention, only his bottom half bent to accommodate sitting. It made his partner uncomfortable, as did anyone trying to relax in the presence of someone who looked like they were on edge. There was a good three inches between him and Hanna — delicate, dry Hanna in his oversized jeans and third-hand shirt — but when the Detective absently closed the distance with a hand over the back of the couch, Hanna looked up at him almost curiously.

Just after the previews (of more old movies re-released on DVD, like Swamp Thing), Hanna finally, finally scooted into him. It was just one scoot, and it was prefaced by a thoughtful look at the distance between their legs, but it put Hanna up against his side. The Detective was almost too tired to smile, but he managed it.

They watched the movie, Hanna's shoulders touching but not at all putting weight on his partner's chest.

Consciousness dragging, the Detective made it to the part where the yappy dog was going to get eaten by the slowly approaching mass of terrifying gelatin-but-mostly-shadow before his head fell back. His sleep was dreamless, which was always a good thing, but it was even deeper and blacker than he had ever remembered. Good black; warm, healing black.

The next morning, he was woken up by Hanna's small hand on his wrist.

"It's 7:58," came the cool whisper at his numb shoulder.

The Detective opened his eyes with a massive effort, squinting towards the poorly-shuttered kitchen window. Watery grey light was just beginning to dribble in, making his kitchen plants look more pathetic and waterlogged than they were. Underneath his fuzzy chin, Hanna was staring at the digital display on his wristwatch, poking it to make it glow again.

"7:59, now."

The Detective blinked. The feeling slowly came back into his legs when he shifted them, and with it, his consciousness returned as well. Hanna was still against his side, like a snapshot from last night, except that his arm had fallen over the zombie's shoulders and the Hanna's face was pressed against his chest. They were still dressed in normal clothes, now very wrinkled.

"Have you been there all night?" he murmured hoarsely, clearing his throat and trying to internalize the image of Hanna staring at his digital watch for eight hours straight.

"I didn't want to wake you up," Hanna said simply, now free to move out from under his arm. He used the freedom to readjust his bulky glasses. He peered up at his partner like he didn't have the aches and pains that were readily making themselves more apparent the longer the Detective was awake. "I don't remember anything about sleeping, but I think it's bad to be woken up if you're snoring really loudly."

"Was I?" his partner asked, baffled by Hanna's matter-of-fact tone. He'd never had anyone else in his life, so he never knew if he snored or not. It had never mattered before now, but the possibility was still moderately embarrassing. Hanna tilted his head curiously.

"Sleeping or snoring really loudly?"

"Both?"

"At least kind of really loudly," Hanna said after a minute, absently patting his shoulder. "But it was okay. You only did it once every five minutes. I sort of started to worry if you didn't."

It took the Detective a few minutes to register what his partner had said. Once he did, the quietness of the weak city morning mixed with a shy glow just under his ribs, lighting him up.

"You worried, huh?" he nearly whispered, a slow smile dawning on his unshaven face. Hanna stared up at him then looked down at the couch wordlessly, a small line growing between his brows, but it was enough. Unable to help himself, the older man reached out for him and put an arm around his tiny shoulders.

He held Hanna to his chest for a minute, but not too tightly, careful not to crush this thing that might be getting a foothold inside of him. Hanna's body, stiff with rigor mortis but mobile in a way magic couldn't explain, came close with a little creak. He leaned silently against the older man's mutilated chest, stitched cheek right against the largest tear in the Detective's flesh, his pointy nose scraping a staple through his shirt.

When the older man drew back, Hanna's stare was as blank as ever, making him wonder if he was just imagining things. God, he hoped he wasn't. If he could ask for one thing in his life, it would be that he wasn't imagining this. Even if Hanna didn't seem to care one way or the other, he did, and he realized that was what mattered. Right now, this was what he had to live for.

He let go, breathing out the last of his misgivings and tension. In the wake of his loosened arms, the small zombie slid off the couch and tugged his baggy yellow shirt straight, then set off around the couch in a way that was almost business-like. His partner smiled slightly to see it.

"You can get dressed." Something clanged behind him. "I'll make you breakfast."

Smile disintegrating, the Detective palmed his face as quietly as possible. Then he sighed, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop him (but he had at least one pot to spare and they could go to goodwill tomorrow and get another set for Hanna to systematically demolish), and went to get into his slacks and a tie. Mondays were still Mondays, even with a zombie housekeeper.


	9. Vampires

A/N: For some reason I love the idea of Conrad passively crushing on unZombie in a weird way. But I think that's more a product of unZombie's uncontrollable sexiness, leaving Conrad a hapless victim of his charms. Yep.

AWWWW CONRAD'S GOT FRIENDS NOW. Real supernatural friends! Can you feel the family-vibe closing in?

Also, Luce/Coat and ConWorth fluff. Even if its prickly, but that's the way their fluff always is. Gnee. Queen and drugs, how cute. Oh and total credit goes to SpookMouse for the idea of Worth getting kinda cuddly when fucked-up, that woman is a genius.

PS: What's hilarious about this is that, while those on Y!gal will catch the nod to a certain picture I drew, all I had to do was add the song title. I went back, and the reference to Imogen Heap was already there in the original draft! THIS FIC IS FREAKING ME OUT, MAN. It's like it's just clawing to be written and is just using me as a tool to get there… Creeeeepy.

_Warnings: language, violent stuff mentioned, mentioning of sexual activities, Hard Truths About Vampires_

* * *

Vampires

* * *

Apparently Hanna and the Detective had been taking it easy on the whole 'seeking out murderous underworld creatures' thing, because Conrad ended up calling the Detective before the latter could come bearing the pieces of his zombie pal into his morgue.

They decided on another lunch to meet up, or at least a coffee break. The two men cornered themselves up in a bookstore on twelfth, far away from the lounging kids and their iPods, no matter how interested Conrad was in their modified covers. They had been there for about half an hour, trading some small talk… or, at least, smaller talk than usual.

Granted, he could have just passed the business card off, but Conrad was starting to _like_ the Detective. There was something stoic and masculine and plainly _epic_ about him that made Conrad think that, if he spent more time around him, he would be safer, even if the other man was the handsome harbinger of every hell he'd experienced for the past month. It was paradoxical, yes, but it felt like nothing too bad could happen to you if you were sipping chai next to the Detective and that sense of security was pretty wonderful.

What was more, Conrad had been gifted with an amazing epiphany that morning while shampooing his hair. He had spent so much time having information dragged out of him that he hadn't realized he _had_ information and it could be put to good use. Because, really, he shouldn't be telling Luce about Hanna, he should be telling Hanna about Luce. The zombie was looking for any hint of his past. This could help.

Unfortunately, Hanna was 'neck deep in books' and couldn't come, which left Conrad hemming and hurring awkwardly with the business card in-hand, really alone with the Detective for the first time in a public place _during daylight_ that sported a distinct lack of dead people. Or, at least, so he hoped. No one really checked the politics section of the bookstore anymore and the coffee smell would drown out anything.

"He's a … magic-user."

God, it was embarrassing to say aloud. Conrad felt like he was back in high-school, Dungeons and Dragons style. He grimaced and fumbled the card up from the table, placing it between the Detective's open fingers.

"Here's his address. Or, at least, the place where he wants you to meet. I don't know where it is, but it looks like it's on the docks. You're supposed to text him this special … code-word or something according to when you want to meet, it's all on the card."

"You're a fast worker, Dr. Achenleck," the Detective said mildly, not bothering to hide how impressed he was as he looked over the weirdly prim handwriting that covered the back of the card.

"I told you, please don't call me doctor," Conrad muttered into his cup, chasing a bit of whipped cream. "It's, uh, weird. Just Conrad, now. Please."

The older man's only answer was a small, affable shake of his head. The Detective flipped the card over and smiled absently, like this was a great thing to fall into his lap, then his eyes found the only printed thing on the business card — Lamont Toucey, in typewriter font — and a shadow passed over his face. He frowned as he looked up at Conrad, seeming to realize _who_ had handed it to him.

"Where did you get this information?" he asked uncertainly, holding the card up for the coroner to see even as the other man conspicuously hid his face in his sleeve and forced out a cough before it was quite ready to happen, bespectacled face going splotchy. "I mean, how did you know about this Lamont person?"

Of course, the fake cough set off a bout of real hacking that lasted two whole minutes at least — which was really convenient when he thought about it, even if it left his eyes watering. It took him that long to decide whether he really wanted to tell the Detective about Luce like this, but the answer was pretty unavoidable if he was going to ask for their protection any time in the future. He took a deep breath.

"You know that, uh… _vampire_," he said it so quietly he barely heard himself, "that got you in the alley?"

_He wasn't the only one Luce got in an alley_, his brain snorted, making one of Conrad's eyes twitch.

"Yes," Hanna's partner said, looking at him with an expression so open it was like he wasn't even capable of suspicion … and Conrad realized maybe the Detective _should_ be suspicious. Maybe he had his hands in something way bigger than he thought — like an evil fucking vampire who did awful things to people — and he was being negligent in not telling the other man sooner. The young coroner sighed and ducked his head.

"I've sort of … I've seen him. Okay, more than seen him. He's harassed me at least three times. Broken into my house and, uh, stuff."

The Detective's expression went blank like someone had blasted his face with bleach.

Conrad caught the distinct emotional flinch of _what have I dragged you into,_ and his heart gave a little twitch that someone would think that about him. Of course, he would be pissed if the Detective had dragged him into Luce _killing_ him or something, but since things were fine — er, mostly fine — it was just a nice sentiment that Conrad rarely got to see on anyone's face.

He wasn't used to _seeing_ people care about him, even if it was just an expression of the basest human regard for life.

"Are you alright?" the Detective said quietly, tensely, and god, like an anvil on his head, Conrad suddenly _wished_ he were attracted to the man.

Well, of course he was _attracted_ to him, anyone would be. But he was like some sort of supernatural city prince in a trench-coat, with the mature, handsome worry on his face, and Conrad honestly wished he could just fall in love with him or something but he kept thinking about dicks like Luce. Not that there should be a sentence with the words 'love' and 'Luce' within a thousand words of each other. No. But he was so damn … _celibate_ that it was hard not to kind of grab onto the first guy — thing — to touch him in years.

He was a man. He'd had very little proof of it till now (he usually just confined himself to being a _person_), but he had his weaknesses, which included saying yes to sex when the opportunity presented itself. He wouldn't admit that to the Detective, of course, and he certainly wasn't going to even mention anything about having crazy sex with said vampire in an alleyway even if it had been amazing.

Er. What he could remember of it.

"I'm, hah, fine."

_Understatement_, his brain sneered happily; he chased it off with a gulp of water.

"He's, uh … won't say he's harmless but the most pain he's given me are headaches. He's really, really annoying."

He wasn't thinking about what Lamont said, wasn't thinking about what Lamont said. Addressing it, but not thinking-pondering-obsessing-panicking.

"Better annoying than murderous," the Detective said with a faint, relieved-yet-hesitant smile that, again, made Conrad want to _want_ to just fall all over him. "He shouldn't be able to do that, though."

"Do what?"

"Come into your house," the older man answered simply, putting his hand out. Conrad stared at him, unaware how he had missed out on such a vital bit of information for being a generally nerdy kid when he was younger. The Detective leaned over the coffee table, knitting his fingers together under his stubbly chin. "It's hard-wired into them through magic. From what Hanna's told me, vampires can't enter a house unless invited. Unless you accidentally invited him in?"

"I haven't invited anyone in for months," Conrad half-laughed, then realized how fucking pathetic that sounded, especially in that high, wavering pitch and _why did he have to say that shit shit shit_. He cleared his throat, mortified. "I don't know about that. It's just that, uh … he knows Hanna."

"I gathered as much from the alley, but I didn't know what to think. Hard to do that with a knife to your side," he said grimly, then looked at Conrad for more.

"He knows-knows him. From before he died," Conrad clarified, expression stymied as he tried to gather his fragments into words. "I think he… I know he was his friend. He was dropping hints about helping him out with something on a regular basis, but I don't know what it was."

"Maybe he helped Hanna with his investigations," the Detective mused, frown deepening. "Like a partner. I've seen what Hanna can do, but defending himself and working a case through are two different things. He must have been different when he was alive, but maybe he wasn't able to complete things without someone to rein him in. He — the vampire — was very … hostile that I was with Hanna."

"_I'd ask you why you raised him, but you don't look sharp enough for that necromancy shit. Now all that's left is why the hell you picked up a zombie and dressed 'im up like a fuckin' little girl—er is he just yer type, asshole? Cute young'n dead?"_

Conrad turned the information over in his head, staring into his empty cup. He hardly believed Luce would be jealous, but then again, what did he know about how isolated vampires were? Yes, there was the contractor-guy, Lamont, but maybe Hanna was the only friend he'd made and managed to keep for a long time. Like, longer than two days.

That whole crazy-protective wolf-pack thing was definitely there. Toned down, it might have even been affectionate instead of angry and psychotic. Maybe.

"I think he's just worried about him," Conrad sort of assumed-too-much/lied, then gave a nod when the Detective's very expression said '_then why'_. "And yet refuses to come see Hanna himself."

At length (and after a generous amount of absolutely gorgeous pensive staring and head-shaking), the Detective rose and slung his bag over his shoulder, face serious.

"If he drops in again, please pass it along that, if his intentions are peaceful, we're honestly interested in meeting with him." His grip tightened on his bag strap and he gave Conrad a meaningful look. "And if he gives you any legitimate trouble, you know our number."

"Wouldn't be the first time I've had to call you over a vampire," Conrad said weakly.

The coroner was about to say more, maybe 'goodbye and I hope I don't see you in the morgue again, especially on a table' or something involuntarily morbid and thoroughly cliché like that, but he was interrupted by the waiter. It was the bill, which the Detective had obviously forgotten about because he reached for his little receipt snippet with a half-pained expression. Before he could, Conrad snagged them both and put a tenner on the tray and flashed him a no-nonsense smile, which was perhaps the stupidest and most nervous-slash-knightly expression he'd ever made.

"I'll, uh—don't worry about that. I got it."

It sort of startled him, actually. Conrad knew he wanted to do it, so he did. He wasn't used to being kind of his own accord: he was used to doing things out of guilt and this was a nice change. He wanted to help them. If he had money—and he did—he could help the two out this way, even if it was just a cup of free coffee.

Any and all awkwardness—the Detective didn't _see_ awkwardness, he eventually realized, just intentions—was worth it when the older man smiled at him and straightened like a weight had been lifted off of him.

"I haven't had time to really say so with all the chaos and … interruptions, but thank you so much for your help, Conrad. All of the lines you've crossed for Hanna and myself … I know it's caused you no small amount of stress. I know this is all unnerving and it's really shaken up your view on the world, but you're coping like few could and we couldn't do this without you."

He waited until Conrad rose to his feet and then offered his hand to the coroner. Conrad half-smiled and took it, caught up in the Detective's firm handshake as the other man looked into his eyes with real thankfulness.

"You're a good man and a better friend."

Conrad swallowed and smiled, expression more stunned than he wanted it to be but it felt like his face had been hit with novocaine. He was friends with the Detective, now?

_Well, of course you're friends_, some embarrassed part of him blustered. You couldn't come out of several scrapes surrounding a dead boy without getting close to someone; acquaintance was too cold for that, and didn't explain the massive mutual mental coping required. Hell, he had sewed his friend up. Conrad smiled to himself, the new smile much more sincere as he gave the man's hand an extra-strong shake, agreeing to the title with a simple physical motion.

He had friends, sure, but they were all friends he'd made years ago. Hadn't made a new one in … forever. Since college.

Somehow, it was like a nice little affirmation of the man he'd become that someone wanted to be friends with him now. Maybe it was what he'd needed for a few years and hadn't known it. Whatever it was (and regardless of how many supernatural factors pushed it), it felt good.

He walked through the rest of the day and the next two with an absent smile on his face, only improved when he replaced his cracked glasses. It had faded down to a quirk of his mouth by Wednesday night, when he stood humming to himself (an older Imogen Heap song, 'Say Goodnight and Go') in front of the sink, eyes wandering his collection of pill bottles. Anti-anxiety, sleep medications, antacids, anti-pyretics, anti-nausea pills.

Lots of anti's. He was feeling pretty good, now, almost like he could do without a few of them. Conrad leaned forward and closed the mirrored cabinet. Reaching for his toothbrush, he squinted at a pile of white clothes or towels he had left in the bathtub, then jumped and turned when it _moved_.

"_Jesus fucking Christ_," he spat, ramming his back against the sink and sending his hair-gel collection tumbling.

"Sorry, pup. That whole name'a the lord shit don't work with me. You start singin' anythin' from Hair, though, and I'll fuck righ' off."

Luce. In his bathtub. Laying there. Didn't show up in the mirror. Just a pile of —

Jesus Christ.

After a second of staring at the sloppily reclined vampire, shaking down to his toes, Conrad simply turned back toward the mirror. After a trembling moment, he turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on his face, following the drips down his arms and scrubbing like it was warm and he did this every night. He kept his arms clamped close to his body, radiating a coldness so extreme it hurt his bones.

Behind him, Luce — Luce's coat — heaved himself up out of the bathtub and wandered forward.

"Wha', no welcome home kissy?" came the drawl, voice lazy and devious and _murderer_.

_Fucking murderer_, he made himself think, reaching for his toothbrush with shaking hands.

The reason that he was able to talk to the Detective about it was that he wasn't actually thinking about it. There was that one hard night, and then he'd just stopped considering it as real. The whole scene with Lamont in the alleyway seemed like a bad dream: the second he passed off the business card to the Detective, it was over. But now, seeing Luce in the grizzled flesh, it was all he could think about. He cramped up, brain shutting down.

It didn't matter how many mitigating sentences Lamont had tossed Luce's way. The vampire had killed people. Ripped them to pieces. And now it was breathing down his neck.

Who knows when Luce had made the mental progression from a _he_ to an _it_, but _its_ very presence found Conrad digging his hands into his counter, back stiff.

"Get out," he muttered, lips numb. He saw the coat pause in the mirror, empty sleeve cocked almost inquisitively.

"Aw, I get it. it's the dead-guy thing," Luce concluded after a long moment, voice all-too-smug. The coat flared, the product of a lazily cocked hip. "Y'were nice enough ta me when I was laid out onna slab like one'a yer buddies."

One of the coat's fur cuffs bounced atop the empty pants' knee.

"Come on over here and I promise I'll lie real still an' all. Long 'nuff fer you ta get yer rocks off, at leas', an' I'd say that's damn charitable."

"I said get the fuck _out of my house,_ Luce!"

It was ripped out of his cold chest by some descending fog of fear, punctuated by the clatter of a toothbrush being thrown at the sink. Conrad half-shouted it like he was coldly furious and he _was_, but it was mostly cold because he realized he was terrified. Scared, not just of what could happen now, but what happened before.

He let Luce do shit to him. He could get into his apartment at any time; he could lose control and kill him. He had killed people, before.

Conrad was still forcing his mind around the fact that he had let a murderer have sex with him when Luce walked forward and made the mistake of touching him. The second Luce's clawed hands closed in on his hips, it was like someone had physically struck him: and, for the first time in his life, Conrad hit back.

He spun around and his fist connected with the vampire's face with a brutal jolt that went all the way to his shoulder. Something cracked. Luce, suddenly possessing an unshaven face and pale, clawed hands, staggered back with a grunt and a loose spray of muddy blood, stumbling down to the floor and smacking his head on the side of the bathtub.

The vampire just slouched there for a moment, eyes clenched tightly, as Conrad breathed heavily through his nose, backing flat against his sink. A thick whine drifted from Luce's gritted, dagger-like teeth. When he opened them, his red eyes were so sharp it was frightening. Something worse than violence and more intelligent than Conrad had ever seen.

His claws were crumpled at his sides, completely loose.

"Lemme guess," Luce said oh-so softly, lip curled. Blood ran unchecked down his chin, drip-drip-dripping onto his white collarbone. Onto his grubby undershirt. "Monty ran his mouth."

Conrad looked down at him, gut twisting. He swallowed frantically, trying to force himself over the shock of punching someone. His knuckles hurt.

"Yeah," he choked out. "He did."

His bathroom was completely silent. The small pieces of abstract art on the walls seemed perversely calm and civilized. Luce didn't pull any swooshing tricks or demand more, or even move to wipe the blood away, which for some reason made Conrad's skin crawl. His heart pumped even faster. The stillness and silence was so awful and oppressive that Luce didn't even have to move: Conrad went cold all over and blurted it out before he could stop himself.

"You rip people apart. He said you do."

He looked, petrified, for any darkening of expression, not quite thinking through the whole _getting a vampire angry_ thing but just needing to get it out in the air. He had to get it out, scrape it from his collapsing ribs where it had made a giant spot of wet-rot next to his liver. It couldn't do much more harm in words than it had done to his insides.

"He s-said you were a … mutt."

Red eyes locked on his, boring into everything behind his glasses. Luce's rough face didn't change an iota. Conrad found himself looking at the lines under his eyes and the roughness of his jaw while Luce, not breathing, just stared.

"Gotta tip the kid. After all I've done fer 'im, the lip-service he gives me's got no fuckin match," he growled at last, finally heaving himself to his feet and spitting into the tub, taking a corner of his coat and smearing it under his nose. The red-brown splotch it left looked like an oil spill and he dropped it like he didn't care. He sniffed thickly, pointy teeth grit.

Conrad watched all of it—every single groggy, human movement—with his heart in his throat. Where was his reaction?

"Are you?" Conrad demanded when he couldn't stand it anymore. His fist was hovering at chest-level, a little droplet of blood on it, like it was proof that he could hurt him.

"What? A mutt er a murderer?" Luce asked, voice deadly soft.

Conrad didn't get a chance to clarify. Luce was in his face the next second, too fast even though the coroner had seen every furious step.

"Lemme ask ya this. If you were a clique who prided yer pretty asses on bein' pureblood — like you humans really do f'ya look at any culture-crash inn'a history'a mankind — what'd happen if a mullato kid with the headmaster's blue eyes walked inta a ballroom full'a plantation whites? A creamy walkin' in on picnic fer the gov'ner?" Luce demanded, voice rougher than the coroner had ever heard it. "Not that I need the fuckin help, but they don't just shake their heads at rumors, they spread em as far and fast as they can. They want me out, not that I was ever in ta begin with. Never _wanted_ to be in, but to them it's either in or ash and I ain't ash yet."

He thumbed his nose (possibly broken, but it was looking _straighter_ already how the fuck did that work) and gave another wet sniff, eyes narrowing afresh.

"An' yeah. You kin say I'm a murderer. All of us are," he said nastily, glaring hard into Conrad's face. "Vamps kill. They can sparkle all they want, maybe make you like what happens beforehand so you go out easy, but it's just what they fuckin' do at the end'a the night."

"That's no ex—" Conrad began heatedly, startled into silence when Luce's hand clamped onto his arm hard enough to bruise, yanking him an inch closer.

"Yeah, it ain't," Luce hissed, red-stained lip curling viciously. "So when it happens, idiot, it's 'cos I haven't had a bite in fer fuckin ever 'cos I can't swallow the thought'a more sad saps out there dyin' cause'a me. Just 'cos you turn down a wrong alley ain't a reason ta fuckin die. So I lose it and end up makin' a fuckin' animal outta myself 'cos I can't stand not bein' human anymore and whatever's in me just won't give up and fuckin' die."

The bony hand on the coroner's wrist gave one last, hard squeeze, nothing but a spillover of the scraping rage (fury, resentment, hopelessness) of the vampire's voice. Then Luce flung his wrist down like he was disgusted to touch him. Conrad wanted to stumble back but couldn't, eyes wide and heart stalled in his chest as the vampire began to pace haltingly.

"I'll take fer granted he gave you the whole spiel, so I'll jus' go on, eh? I gotta bite a ton'a people 'cos I never take enough to kill 'em. Always stop short; half the other fuckers out there don't and their tally of meals and human lives is always one fer one. You got no idea what it's like ta _stop_, but I do it every fuckin time."

Luce turned back towards Conrad with a flare of his blood-stained coat as he jabbed a clawed finger at his sunken chest, voice unfathomably fierce.

"I took an oath once — only impor'ant thing I ever done — and now I spend every goddamned night'a my immortal life breakin' it in one way er another an I'm gonna keep doin' it until someone stakes me or I go sunbathin'. You tell me if I don't got the right to fuck up every now and again, knowin' that. My body-count isn't a fraction of some vamps out there and you better fuckin' know that. They just do it prettier than I do and they think they got the right to brag."

For a moment, Luce just stared into nothing. The complete removal of life in that stare was so arresting it took the breath right out of Conrad, but when awareness came creeping back into the vampire's sharp features, it was cold and uncertain. It was like the words had hurt Luce's thin mouth on the way out, injured him in some way as they exited so quickly and violently.

He had said them before, in fragments, but never like this. When he looked at Conrad, the sudden movement made the coroner jerk. Luce sneered; his way of regaining control over his numb features.

"Eh? Y'look surprised, Dr. Achenleck."

Conrad did, he knew he did; he could feel it stretching and bleaching his face. He flinched from the name, the tone. The weight in his chest was almost too large to swallow down. Luce ducked down far enough to glare coldly into his face.

"You thought I just ripped 'em apart for fun and splashed around in whatever was left? Jesus Christ. You'd give a psychopath more credit'n that."

The vampire gave a scathing snort that hit Conrad like a punch to the gut, then looped a leg over the tub and sat down, slouching against the wall.

Conrad had never been so quieted in his entire life. The quiet went down to his toes, a quietness of nerves and of soul. It was all he could do not to just fall down where he was, confronted with such a void.

Luce had never shown anything but enjoyment for what he was. Conrad assumed he was just a jock refashioned by teeth and immortality: a dumb, arrogant pleasure-seeker, totally unaware of the repercussions of what he did. The flash of the man inside the vampire was so intense it was like a brand on his mind. Maybe it was even more hellish, considering his hedonist nature. He was offered pleasure and snippets of absolution, the best drug anyone could ever imagine, and yet he stopped in order to spare people's lives. Knowing, maybe, that if he drank anyone dry, he could never stop doing it.

Then again, maybe this was a phase — and god knows how many phases humans went through in their measly eighty-year lifespan, but vampires had eternity. Their dark phases had the chance to grow so much darker and their reality was midnight in the first place. When Conrad actually thought about it, Luce's imagined endless night stretched out in front of him and chilled him to the core.

How could he think Luce was soulless? Violent and rude and a bully and a dick, but _soulless_?

"I'm sorry," he said, realizing he meant it like his heart was going to wither and die. Luce didn't look at him; a testament to how weak those two words were. Conrad cleared his throat. "Really."

Luce's sharp profile remained, resentful and cold.

"Look, I swear. I … just didn't understand."

Conrad still didn't, but there was no way Luce didn't have emotions. No way he wasn't struck by what he did.

"An' everythin'll go along just peachy if you don't pretend like ya do," Luce said sharply, not quite accepting his apology but pushing past it. Real Luce. Or at least the most genuine part of Luce he'd seen.

The viciously bent line of the vampire's back still spelled hostility and Conrad had no idea what to do with a seriously upset Luce — or rather, a seriously upset Luce that wasn't showing any inclination of leaving. As much as he had offended the vampire, he was still half-in his tub and that confused the hell out of Conrad. He should be taking wing out of his bathroom window or something.

Conrad swallowed and took a step forward, but by then his undead stalker had gathered himself, the set of his shoulders once more spelling 'surly asshole' instead of 'cagey, hurt animal'.

"All y'should be concerned about is that I'll always leave you breathin', peaches. Always. Thas' where you and me stop, get me?" Luce gave him a curt glance, then set his sharp teeth on an equally sharp nail. "Y'don't see me grillin yer cop pals 'bout yer fuckin' eatin' habits."

Conrad was about to say that killing people and splurging on steak every so often were totally not even the same thing, but Luce cut him off by digging in his pocket with a lush grin that was even more disturbing than usual when it broke out of such a cold, solemn face.

"Now let's get ont'a fergettin about this little altercation by gettin' razed off our asses tanight," he said devilishly, holding up a little blue pill rescued from the depths of his coat.

"What—is that Percocet?" Conrad asked dumbly, squinting at it.

"Oxycodone. I don't do name brands," Luce supplied glibly, rolling it in his palm and offering it like it was a treasure he was especially proud of, or maybe a treat for a dog.

And he was holding it _towards Conrad_, who took a step backwards, mouth wide.

"No. What is — _no_! _Hell _no, Luce! I am not taking drugs for you!"

It was then that Conrad saw the beauty in the machine of what they were. Worth had this comforting habit of appalling him the moment he started to feel something more for the vampire, whether it be warm or cold, comfortable or uncomfortable. With that hard reset, it was so easy to go back to home base. Namely, name-calling and outrage.

It just made it so fucking _easy_ to pretend like shit was normal, no matter if _normal_ found him with a vampire in his bathroom who wanted him to take a serious downer just so he could bite his neck and trip a little.

God, his life. What—how did—Christ, he didn't even _know_ anymore.

"Remember how I took half of it outta ya behind the bar? This's the same way. You'll only get half a tablet an be able ta go ta work in the morn'." Luce gave a smug expression, arching one brow. "Thanks fer that, by the by."

Conrad just gaped at him, not knowing whether the vampire was thanking him for his usefulness as an alcohol tumbler or the hot sex or both. There was that thing that happened just a few minutes ago, and now there was _this_ thing, and his puny human brain simply refused to make the switch-off. It was too attached to reason and logic and social cues, which vampires learned to let go of after the first few years of dark madness.

All Luce saw was the coroner's flabbergasted expression, which prompted him to rise from the tub, handling his long stick legs like stilts. Conrad pointed at him accusingly.

"Half a tablet _nothing_. You came here to make me take drugs for you!"

"Pretty please, peaches. Y'hurt my feelins pretty damn bad tanight," he cooed. It was relatively true, Conrad realized with something like horror, but he also realized that wouldn't stop Luce from using it to blackmail him. As if to prove him correct, the vampire's simpering, solemn expression was cracked clean in half by a nasty, jumbled-teeth grin. "And I haven't got anyone ta do this fer me since the sixties."

Hit over the head with how old Luce could be, Conrad simply watched as Luce pressed the pill into his hand. With the vampire standing there, arrogant and pleased and easy like he'd done this a million times before (and _hadn't_ just had his curmudgeonly soul flayed in the presence of a man he hardly knew), Conrad realized he could really fucking use the escape right now no matter how illegal it was. Playing the devil's advocate perfectly, Worth leaned forward and curled his cool tongue under his ear and nibbled on it, hand curling around Conrad's arm.

"Good puppy. Now swallow."

Conrad hoped to god that was the first and last time he ever heard that phrase. For a second he just breathed in and out, staring at the pill in his hand. He realized there was a threshold here and, if he crossed it, he wasn't going back.

Jesus, he needed a time out. He really wanted to just let go of reality for a while, stop eying the space under his bed like it was going to eat him, but did he want _this_?

"You won't, you know. Hurt me."

He couldn't help but say it again, because he needed to hear it again. Luce's nails skimmed over his shoulders.

"Didn't say I wouldn't hurt you. Thass' tied up in yer pansiness, which I got no control over. Some people even like a few slaps, though I don' know any myself," the vampire said smugly. His cool lips brushed the back of Conrad's sticky neck. "But I'll always leave you breathin'. Promise."

Conrad stared at the tiny, perfectly clean blue pill with an intentness bordering on manic, as aware of Luce's dry presence draped over his back as he was of the dead man's promise. A promise was a promise, but it wasn't like he'd be around to complain if Luce messed up and did kill him. Unless he came back as a ghost, which seemed like a relatively normal concept to the coroner now.

If he did, he would make sure to haunt the fuck out of Luce. For _forever_. It was both a sick and unimaginably comforting thought.

Conrad's eyes narrowed. Then he pushed the vampire's hand away from his shoulder.

"No."

"No?" Luce repeated roughly. His expression was arrested, like he didn't know whether it was a no to the pill or no to their _thing_. Conrad turned and faced him fully, feeling determined and somewhat calm for the first time that night.

"Not until you take a shower," he said, voice steely.

"_What_?" Luce demanded after a full minute of silence, unshaven face incredulous.

"You're fucking filthy. You're going to be in my house, where I keep all the furniture and shit I don't want filthy. Get in the shower." Conrad crossed his arms, even turning his nose up a little.

"In yer fuckin dreams," Luce sneered, puffing out his matted fur collar with a scandalized flick of his wrists.

"Then no to this," Conrad said, holding the pill out just dramatically enough and moving towards the toilet.

"_Wait_," Luce nearly howled, doing the vampire-swoosh thing just to dig his claws into the back of Conrad's shirt and pull him to a stop a safe distance from the bathroom.

The vampire growled and sputtered, weighing things as Conrad listened almost calmly (but with a definite sense of growing smugness, which fell like nourishing rain on the soul-razing he had just received) then finally let go and shucked his fur-trimmed jacket with one angry flapping sound.

"For the love of … fuckin' yuppie-ass faggot!"

Conrad smiled, even if it was grim and victorious.

Saving his furniture was a good, safe, Conrad-ish thing to focus on and the switch to Autopilot helped immensely, giving strength to the coroner's legs and fire to his glare. He pushed the dirty vampire into the shower and Luce _let him do it_ even though Conrad was absolutely certain that Luce could have overpowered him without even trying. All Luce did was look back and snarl for the sake of expressing his _intense_ displeasure.

There was a moment of running water – Conrad specifically listened for the splash of water off of a body – and then Luce was off, bitching about not using any of the yuppie Bath and Body Works shit, because he wasn't going to be walking around smelling like a giant fag-bucket of fucking faggot strawberries.

Conrad didn't raise protest. It was enough of a victory to get water running over his filthy ass. Now the only marks of Luce's stay would be on his neck and not on his couch or bed, which he was stupidly okay with.

"You take the shit?" the vampire called out from the shower, almost threateningly.

"Just did," Conrad lied, glancing back to where the 'shit' lay on the counter as he left the room with Luce's sagging fur-trimmed coat in hand.

He was back in time to see Luce come out of the shower, stepping out of a cloud of steam. His choppy blond hair glistened like spun brown sugar, skin paler without its constant coating of charcoal grime. It was still yellowed, but far more like the 'ivory in the moonlight' that Conrad had been trained to expect from vampires. He looked incredibly unhappy for being so clean, and his expression only worsened when Conrad brandished the pill and a glass of water.

"Fuckin liar," Luce spat, hackles shooting up.

"I like my furniture and I don't trust you," Conrad said blandly and swallowed it, chasing it with water. It stuck to his tongue a little, leaving him clearing his throat. And, of course, wondering what he'd just done and if there was time to gag it up.

"Where's my coat?" the vampire demanded suddenly, looking around the bathroom floor then staring at him accusingly. "Where's my shit, fagarella?"

"I put it in the wash," Conrad answered, rolling his eyes at the new colorful nickname. Did Luce ever run out of them?

"You put it in the — _what_?"

"Don't tell me it's dry-clean only," Conrad deadpanned, pushing his very shiny new glasses up the bridge of his nose.

"It's fuckin' _no_-clean only, you little — !"

"It had blood on it!" Conrad countered.

"It's my motherfuckin' _coat_," Luce bellowed, like that explained everything. Conrad only stared at him, not _allowing_ himself to be intimidated because he knew instinctively that Luce the Person wasn't a danger, even if Luce the Vampire could be. He just had to make the distinction.

Luce snarled and swiped at the air, flashing his fangs in a truly terrifying fashion. When he spoke again, his voice was a murderous rumble.

"F'yer tryin' to get me to take off, you might just be gettin' there, peaches."

"The sixties was a long time ago," Conrad said simply, and picked up his toothbrush from where he had flung it on the floor.

Finding himself soundly beaten by a stupid little fag he had most certainly underestimated, Luce huffed and puffed and sat back in his fluffy white Bed Bath and Beyond towel, scraping his hands through his hair like he was grudgingly amazed that they actually went all the way through without catching on tangles. Conrad brushed and brushed and spat in the sink, then looked over again. His eyes widened at the complex discoloration right on top of Luce's white collarbone, now totally visible with his naked torso.

"Holy shit! You have a cross on your chest!" Conrad gaped, turning fully around and pointing totally unnecessarily. "My cross!"

That night in the alley when they screwed, Conrad had his favorite cross tie-pin on. It must have gotten pressed against Luce's bare skin at some point and burned him, leaving a gorgeously delicate reddish imprint of the lacy silver piece. A vampire, getting burned by a cross.

Luce's expression clearly said he was getting _way_ too fucking excited about this, glare almost scathing.

"It was _silver_," the vampire grit out, like a stupider fuck had never been born.

"So it wasn't the cross?" Conrad asked after a beat, almost disappointed.

"Wasn't the cross, dumbass," Luce deadpanned, looking like he was counting the seconds until the drugs kicked in and left Conrad incoherent and so much easier to deal with.

"Why silver?" the coroner asked after a moment, having nothing else to do but be curious. Luce stood and flung his slightly-less-fluffy towel off, looking clean and starved with a gorgeously narrow back. Conrad tried not to follow the knobby road of his spine to his ass and failed miserably.

"Allergic to it," he muttered as he stepped up to the bed and flopped down face-first without another word.

"Wai — but – you're still wet!" Conrad protested, skittering forward a few steps as if he could stop it. His foot caught and the very movement almost sent the very well-decorated room spinning for a second.

"Christ, you need downers more than I do, neurotic little pissant," Luce growled into the bed, flinging an arm to the side to gesture at the coverlet he was most certainly ruining. "It's a fuckin' _bed_. You _sleep_ on it or you _fuck_ on it. If someone's got time to bitch about how yer bed's got water stains on it, they're either yer landlady or yer obviously not doin' somethin right."

Conrad huffed, a little softer than he should have because he was having a hard time keeping his feet on the ground. He blinked, pressing his hand to his forehead. His vision was weaving a little, space between his temples expanding.

"It kick in yet?"

Luce's voice was suddenly very, very far away.

"Yeah. Yeah, I … think so," he muttered, his own voice muzzy in his ears. He groaned into his hand, caught afresh by the stupidity of the situation. "I cannot believe I'm taking drugs for you."

With nothing to say to that, Luce got up in a shift of skinny-elegant limbs (Christ, how could someone walk on ankles so thin?). Somewhat impressed at his class, Conrad found himself staring not below the waist, but at the multitude of paper-thin scars hatching the surface of Luce's white chest and stick-thin arms as he walked closer and closer. There had to have been a thousand. Ten thousand. Ten thousand million. They multiplied and ballooned and shrunk down to an intricate crosshatching Escher puzzle in his vision, twisting like a kaleidoscope. He squinted to focus on them all, wondering what they were from.

He hardly noticed when Luce took him by the shoulders and led him to the foot of his own bed, hands plucking at his clothing.

"What're you—"

"Like I said, haven't got anyone ta do this fer me since the sixties," Luce said simply, already on the coroner's button-down. Even though he dearly wanted to ask just what he'd agreed to (because the sixties were fucking _crazy_ and he really didn't want a donkey involved in this in any way), Conrad didn't object to having his clothes stripped off: he shivered at the dislocated scrape of cloth, unpredictable and complex. There was a difference between touching yourself and being touched by another person. Taking off clothes was the same way.

No one had ever done this to him before. No one had ever done this _for_ him before. It was… nice.

Worth slid his shirt off his shoulders and his molten arms almost knotted like taffy at the back, winding around his spine, but the vampire saved them from getting hopelessly tangled by running his cool hands down them, nuzzling his neck.

"Oh my fuck," Conrad managed, feeling amazing and awful and drowning and flying all at the same time.

"Strong shit, aint' it?" Luce snickered, slapping at his cheek. The physical shockwave took ages to progress through his clogged body, leaving him staring stupidly at the vampire, fixated by his candy-apple red eyes.

"You have terrifying eyes," he said thickly, realizing it was something he'd wanted to tell the asshole for a long time.

"Aw, peaches, don't go gettin' all sappy on me now. Next yer gonna be tellin' me they look like roses at midnight."

Smirking at the coroner's glazed expression, Luce got right down to business. He ran his thumb almost tenderly over that one fat vein in his throat before pulling Conrad tight against him and biting down.

The combination of the drugs and feeding was something completely indescribable. Conrad literally thought he was going to die, but didn't actually do anything to stop it. Everything (vampires, murderers, sex, unicorns, peanut butter) was all right in that moment, just completely unbearable too. He just sagged in Luce's skinny, naked arms and let the base-beat of the vampire's swallows define his world. His fingers, numb, scrabbled at Luce's lower back. He arched into infinity.

He was panting when it ended, jerking a little because his body remembered being dropped after Luce drank from him once. But this time, Luce held him in place and pushed him back on the bed, where he hit with a Jupiter-jump jolt, feeling weak and amazing and like his shoulders were melting down his arms.

Conrad caught a flash of Luce bending over him, bright beautiful red dotting his smiling mouth, and then it was black for a while.

When he came back to himself, he was still naked and still on the bed, just curled up into a fetal position. The coverlet under his naked back and legs felt amazing, just … astounding. The bedroom was warm and quiet and dark, the only light glowing from his bedside table.

He wasn't sure whether he was expecting sex or not (or if it even worked under drugs like this) but Luce wasn't pushing it. The vampire spent the longest time just sprawled out on the bed next to him with his eyes shut, working his long fingers through the coverlet. Again and again, his fingers curled and stretched and fanned, warping the air around them. Conrad was content to watch the fascinating, liquid movement, getting confused and losing track of fingers and counting doubles sometimes.

After a while, Conrad started snickering at nothing in particular, and that got Luce's eyes open and a small, horribly self-satisfied smirk going. The vampire slid over to him and Conrad flinched at something pressing into his back, but it was only Luce's nose. The vampire's callused hands started to wander up and down his bare back, mouth sometimes following, sometimes not.

Sometimes they traced synapses, sometimes they traced bones, going from ephemeral to corporeal but always Conrad. Always human, always warm, always gently rising and falling. At one point the vampire's whole emaciated body was pressing into his, naked and clean and male and amazing with Luce's mouth just under his ear, and Conrad felt like he could just lie there for fucking forever and soak up his own warmth through Luce.

Then he lolled and rolled and floated on the ceiling for the next eternity, only really waking up when Luce slid down his back like a panther and drove his fangs deep into his right ass-cheek.

"_Ah_," he said so fucking angrily, hands clawing futilely in front of him as the pain burned deep into his muscle and his haze. "Ahhh!"

"No fuss, puppy," Luce snickered _into his ass_, sort of tickling him when he wanted to be _pissed,_ damnit, and it wasn't working. Conrad felt his rough tongue scraping the bite. "S'just a love bite."

"Fuck you," Conrad whined, leaning over to check to see if his ass was in one piece and then forgetting what he was doing and just sort of swooning over to the side, mental tongue hanging out of his mouth. He was just fucked up enough to remember what sobering-up meant but not have any means to implement it, which was a very, very interesting place to be.

"M'so fucked up right now," Luce's voice came gleefully to his right. "Opium ain't shit compared to this."

"You were alive when they used opium?" he slurred, then realized Luce was nuzzling his back again and he squirmed and arched a little as the sensations swamped him. They got distracted (or maybe Luce didn't want to answer the question) and twisted around for a while, the vampire proving that he was never truly too messed up for groping around.

"Mum always told me not to play with my food," Luce purred into his tingling shoulder when Conrad moaned a little pathetically. "But you guys always seem'ta fancy it so much."

Conrad knew it was way too fucking soon for a joke of that caliber, but he was also excruciatingly fucked up and he knew somehow that this was how Luce dealt with things. Joked about it while still looking the facts of life in the face. Pretended he wasn't crashing till he actually crashed.

That must be what a vampire's existence consisted of, Conrad realized with a sudden chime of his internal soul-clock. Up and down and up and down into years and decades and millennia knowing there were only two ways to end it: be killed or face the sunrise.

"Th'fuck is this?"

"Uh?"

Conrad squinted over his shoulder, violently derailed from his actually rather poignant thought train that he would totally forget in the next three minutes. Then he saw Luce staring down at his shoulder-blade and winced.

"Oh. Hallucination," he said glumly, hiding his face in his _fucking amazing soft wow what_ pillow.

"Naw it ain't, oxycodone is jus' a narcotic, mebbe an anti-pyretic er some shit, what the — s'that a fuckin dinosaur?" Luce demanded, voice edging on incredulous. Fuck, how did he have enough brain cells left to even express such a complex emotion? Or use such big words? Had he seriously built up that big of an immunity to being cracked out?

Conrad said something muffled like _no it's not_ even though it clearly was (he remembered getting it, sort of) and Luce was already poking at it, cackling.

"Christ, y'think this makes ya a hard-ass er somethin'?"

"There's a reason its on my back, I didn't think anyone would see it!"

"So ya were _never_ plannin' on gettin' laid. It all makes sense now, huh."

"Shut up! You… ass-thing!"

Luce laughed uproariously and peered at it a little longer, fascinated by the spiny texture of its vertebrae when seen through the feathery goggles gifted by narcotics. It was a dinosaur skeleton, curled on Conrad's shoulder blade with its sinewy tail whipping under its taloned legs. When he was done with his royal inspection (and he could smell Conrad's displeasure and grumpiness rising like a pea-soup fog, even through the chemical musk of the downer), he dropped flat to the coroner's back and nipped at the back of his neck, rubbing his cheek in his soft black hair.

"Yer _cute_."

He said the word like it was a curse word, or something filthy that crept out from under beds at night and left wet trails on the carpet.

"No'm not," Conrad grumbled. It took him up until now to realize that Luce got sleepy eyed and cuddly when he was trashed, and he didn't know whether his enjoyment of it hinged on his lack of sobriety or whether that even bothered him. He was being _cuddled_, damnit, and human beings _liked_ that.

"Yeah, you are." Luce drawled, almost sounding affectionate instead of vilifying until he snickered into his ear. "Cute innat, 'I wanna punch you till you can't stand up then rub yer face inna sand' sorta way."

"You were that kid," Conrad concluded dully.

"Still that kid."

"Kids like you made my life hell," he said vaguely, receiving nothing but a grunt for his lame bit of drug-induced soul-opening.

"Kids like you saved me a fuckton of lunch money," Luce returned without an ounce of guilt, gnawing on a nail again.

"How old are you?" Conrad asked suddenly, and Luce pressed down on him and gave a huge fake snore and he dropped it, just like that, because he didn't want to know. Not really. There was just one thing he really wanted to know, and it was more of an introspective, truly mystifying question that possibly didn't have an answer. That, of course, meant he had to say it aloud after another easy bout of silence.

"Why the hell do I trust you?"

Just behind his ear, Luce chuckled in that superior, asshole way Conrad thought he might just actually come to like.

"'Cos I'm just a good ol' fashioned lover boy, Connie."

"Really?" Conrad murmured, eyes slipping shut. He might have been smiling but he wasn't quite sure. The nerves in his face were taking quite a vacation. For the first time in weeks, he felt honest-to-god peace settle in his heavy body. "Queen, really? At a time like this?"

"All time is Queen time," Luce answered, yawning. "Anythin' else is fuckin sacrilege

Conrad didn't know how to disagree without having a vengeful, strangely cuddly vampire set on him, so he didn't try. He had given Luce enough horrible soul-rending shit for one night, his music choices weren't up for discussion. After that, they murmured back and forth, bitching at each other drowsily and generally drifting closer and closer as the hours crept by in the dark bedroom.

Who knows when Luce fell asleep, but Conrad ended the night with the vampire draped over his back, chapped mouth pressed close to his neck and the quiet, gentle pulse that thumped on and on and on inside of him.


	10. Selkies and Spellcraft

A/N: Love this chapter. LOVE IT. I DIED WHILE WRITING IT and now I am dead fhdkfgldkg the first gnee appears.

I love Veser here, despite his utterly cracky concept. I hope you do, too!

PEE ESS FOR GODS SAKE DON'T DICK WITH THE SPELL ITS NONSENSE I AM TOO LAZY TO FIND A GAELIC TRANSLATOR GOD SO ASHAMED AND HUNGRY TOO MMM FOOD

_Warnings: language, some disturbing/violent magical imagery_

* * *

Selkies and Spellcraft

* * *

The Detective wasn't very good at texting.

He had never really had a chance to find this out before, but he managed to poke out a simple enough message on his flimsy pay-by-the-minute phone to arrange a Thursday night meeting with the witchdoctor Conrad had secured for them. Bowled over as he was by the coroner's unexpected tenacity, nine p.m. still seemed a little too early for something so shifty.

Little did he know, both the early night and the texting were mandatory … otherwise, parents might have gotten involved.

The warehouse section of the docks was a holey maze of corrugated iron and wet grey fog. The latter soaked into their heavy clothing, adding two pounds of weight and the sharp stench of dead fish. The ancient docks creaked terribly underneath their feet, black water sloshing close below.

The Detective felt Hanna drift closer to him, putting his warm body between him and the edge of the dock at all times. The Detective knew the little zombie disliked water intensely. He could only be coaxed into a run two ways: if his partner was in a life-threatening situation, or if a surprise shower hit the city. Hanna plainly did not want to be there, but his reluctance was an encouraging mark in more than one way. First, the speculated prize was enough to risk proximity to water; second, Hanna was clearly _feeling_ things, even if they were negative.

The pair of investigators walked at a forcibly calm pace under a string of busted lamps until they came to warehouse 6A, one of the only buildings with the door still on its hinges. Shivering slightly in the heavy ocean cold, the Detective stopped to check his cellphone, affirming the meet-up place and the time on the tiny green screen. The warehouse's peeling façade towered above them, rusted holes giving way to the inky blackness inside.

The older man turned slightly when he felt a tug in his trench-coat pocket, then followed the line of a skinny stitched-up green arm. Hanna was pointing beyond the yellow light of the lamp, where a pair of stick-thin legs and a blue-grey hoodie was hanging by one of the peeling metal walls. The figure was absorbed in scuffing its green tennis-shoes on the rotting wood of the dock, posture hunched and rebellious.

The Detective stiffened a little, on guard against hoodlums and wary of having their privacy invaded, but the figure turned and the hood fell back.

"You Marc Raney?" the kid asked, flashing the most amazing teeth the Detective had ever seen. They barely seemed to fit in his mouth: small and sharp, they bristled from all directions, pristine and white and utterly terrifying. Like a lamprey. Just … shoved into the open mouth of a boy with strangely silvery hair and a thoroughly impatient expression, like he wanted to get on with this already.

"A kid," Hanna's whisper came from behind him, deadpan.

"Kid? Fuck, bet you a twenty I'm older'n you." The hoodlum snorted derisively, then opened one alarming highlighter-green eye and gave Hanna a scathing up-and-down. He blinked. "Whenever you croaked, I mean."

The Detective's mouth fell open, but he didn't have a chance to react further. Veser Amacker Falun, as he was called, shocked the older man again by wiping at his pug nose and slamming open the door to the dilapidated warehouse with his foot, creating an ear-splitting clang that made the Detective's cop side wince, even as he knew how rarely the dock area was patrolled.

"Well stop gaping already and get in, I don't want this to look like any more of a crack deal than it already does," Veser said blandly, rolling his eyes as he disappeared into the mouth of the sagging iron cave. "You losers better pay by the charm 'cos I'm fuckin' fast and I don't wanna be in here for more than an hour. I got homework."

For a moment, they were left out on the freezing dock, feet glued to the old wood. Hanna was the one to follow the witchdoctor's lead first, walking calmly into the black until his partner complied as well.

Every footstep echoed hollowly, only adding to the foreboding atmosphere of the empty warehouse. The zombie's eyes provided enough watery blue light to walk by until Veser produced an electric lamp from nowhere and created a new world about nine feet in diameter, soft at the edges and cast in yellows and sharpie-black shadows. The Detective felt the cold night solidify around him, now a tangible force to be beaten back by the buzz of electricity.

Until he found his voice, it was all the older man could do just to stand and watch the witchdoctor set up his gear.

"What are you, uh, studying?" the Detective asked at length, at a loss for what to say to get the conversation started. He was thrown off by the witchdoctor's mention of homework, but he _did_ look young. Horribly young, and vagrant-ish to boot. Veser honestly looked like he would be completely at home bumming change in an arcade and relentlessly hitting on older women, which didn't do much for the older man's confidence.

That wasn't even taking into account that the kid had a fin on his hoodie. A fin? Really?

"Oh, I go to Creepy Old Basement Library University and I'm shooting for a Major in Sea-Magic with a minor in Voodoo."

When the Detective didn't appear to get the joke (or, indeed, didn't seem to be the joking type, at least when his zombie partner was concerned), the young man shook his head, looking grim.

"Gen ed, and it's slow going. Fuckin' hate school."

Veser ransacked his battered backpack looking for his materials, haphazardly throwing aside a shiny Nintendo DS to get to a divining bowl. He dug to get candles — nine of them, all white but smeared with lint and pencil lead— and set them aside before groping around on the filthy boarded-up floor. When he found the board he was looking for, he lifted it up with a grunt, revealing a rune-circle much, much more intricate than the one Hanna had scribbled out in the abandoned housing project. White lines crisscrossed the center like a dream-catcher, words of an unknown language spiraling over the edges.

Noticing the pair staring, Veser turned and puffed his chest out.

"Put it here myself a few months ago. Dumbasses never think to check under the boards," he said with perverse pride, obviously quite pleased to be beating the Man. Veser returned to his prep-work, and Hanna and the Detective left him in silence for the most part, both of them obviously thinking over the information that the supernatural contractor had given to Conrad. Conrad hadn't mentioned they would be dealing with a teenager, but had specified the witchdoctor's race and his half-exiled status, which was yet another mystery.

"I thought selkies were girls," Hanna said out of nowhere, watching Veser's scuffling almost doubtfully.

The teen snorted as if severely annoyed with what seemed to be a common and frequently voiced misconception.

"You just _hear_ about the chicks. Sexiest things out there, downright addicted to getting abducted and having ballads written about it. Guy selkies are exactly the same, you just don't find many chicks willing to club them over the head and drag them back home to be hubbies. They're still sexy as hell and magical and shit." Veser paused to gather some bottles, the glass clinking sharply in the cavernous warehouse. He emptied their clear contents into the divining bowl then leaned back to wiggle his eyebrows and drawl, "That way, I'm all selkie."

"Are you…" the Detective trailed off, unsure how to proceed when given such cryptic hints from a boy who seemed to take offense quite easily.

"Half-breed," Veser said promptly, bright green eyes locked on the powders he was mixing in a Tupperware bowl. The older man looked to Hanna and could take no knowledge of selkie mating habits from his glowing blue eyes. He tugged at his faded black tie.

"Do selkies usually…"

"Christ, what's with the third degree, Humphrey-fucking-Bogart? And all the fuckin' half-sentences? You really hot on ellipses or some shit? You want my whole fuckin' life-story?" the witchdoctor fired off sharply, turning around to glare at them with his thorny teeth poking contemptuously past his lip.

That was far too many questions from one snotty teen, so the pair of investigators just stared at him blankly, waiting for Veser to make his own conclusions. Even as the witchdoctor looked intensely annoyed that they would ask, he also looked intensely annoyed at everything and anything at all, so Veser settled down rather quickly with a grumpy _okayfinewhatever_ as he set to mixing his powders in earnest.

"Selkies don't bump with humans if they can help it, but it happens. Did with my mom, obviously. Some asshole raped her and she had me."

His flat tone and unflinching work unnerved the Detective more than anything; even Hanna cocked his head curiously.

"He didn't get the 'steal pelt first, rape later' memo and she ended up biting his head off or some shit. Yeah, and I had to grow up like that, and she still never really decided whether she wanted me around. Only stopped by every three years or something. Not the tenderest of upbringings, but hey, we got to go to the beach allll the fuckin' time."

Veser rolled his eyes, then continued his tale free of encouragement, apparently firmly seated on his tangent.

"She died a few days ago. One of the main sea-witches around and it goes genetically. Selkie witches can only have one pup and they aren't supposed to have boys but that's what human gene-fucking does to you, so she missed her shot and I got the title anyways."

"So you're … a sea-witch?" the Detective said hesitantly, spiraling further out of his depth by the moment.

"Hey, dude," the pointy-teeth boy said, looking severely un-amused. "Sea-wizard sounds just plain gay."

As Veser went back to work, the older man could see why this boy wasn't welcome in the mainstream, and not just because of his half-blood status. Maybe he'd learned to be obnoxious as a defense mechanism to being exiled, but it worked. If the Detective's own experience was any indication, it certainly kept people looking for the nearest exit.

Veser was throwing out incense sticks with negligence, sending them rolling over the dirty floor, then upended his bag and shook it violently. A single, fat, red sucker fell out and he _ahh_ed in victory. He snatched it up and stuck it between his teeth while it was still in its wrapper, looking satisfied for the moment.

"Kay, wheel pulseless over here," the sea-witch muttered, lurching to his feet and brushing off his jeans. Suddenly, the sucker wrapper was gone—had he even taken it out of his mouth? The fact that he spit it to the side a second later and swished the sucker to the other side of his mouth said no.

Unnerved by the half-selkie's swiss army knife mouth, the Detective started to put a hand to Hanna's shoulder, but it was unnecessary. The young zombie was already padding towards the middle of the magic circle, blue eyes empty of apprehension or excitement or fear. Veser grudgingly stepped back to let the light of the electric lamp hit Hanna in full, slouching as he studied the small yellow-washed zombie. He inspected Hanna's hands, his luminous eyes, his stitches, and even took a curl of his unexpectedly bright red hair and frowned at it.

After a long pause, Veser poked him in the side of the head. Then he poked Hanna again. It was okay the first and second time, but it got just plain unceremonious the third time. When the Detective opened his mouth to protest, the sea-witch made an impatient sound and stepped back, crossing his arms.

"He shouldn't be this … dead."

"But he is dead," the Detective said cautiously, unused to doubting the very definition of very basic words. There wasn't much deader you could get than no pulse and he had never seen Hanna breathe or attempt to.

"I know, but — dude, seriously, who's the expert on voodoo here?" Veser demanded nastily, which got the older man to shut his mouth rather quickly. Veser snapped and motioned to Hanna, who stood looking passively at the far wall. "I mean, look at him. Rot hasn't set in on his brain or anything and on a scale of just-born to dust he's like, 'just stopped breathing'. _Barely_ dead, or even like _mostly_ dead in terms of zombies. He should be a little perkier than this."

Veser _hmmm_ed and actually looked a little professional for a minute as he poked at Hanna's temple again, who turned a bit but still didn't blink.

"Think something's stuck in his pipes."

"What can you do?" Hanna's partner asked, crossing his arms and messing with his sleeves to hide his sudden anxiety. He plainly didn't like the idea of Veser rummaging around in Hanna's insides, especially if the way he treated his backpack was any indication of his level of care.

"What the man does," Veser said arrogantly, taking a second to puff out his scrawny chest again before going back to his knees and bringing out a piece of chalk.

He drew out a smaller circle over the already-existing seal and hatched it nine different ways with a practiced hand, then rimmed it with the powders he had just mixed, plus a little sea-salt. Like some kind of rusty supernatural generator had been jumpstarted, a burst of power flickered through him and the circle. A blue haze went over his eyes and slipped beneath his skin, but the Detective could have sworn he saw the shadow of a sinewy sea creature with a fin in the filmy bounds of Veser's body; then it was gone.

When his senses returned, Veser was murmuring in a complex, melodic Gaelic-sounding language; the older man's anxiety for Hanna clashed with the rising humidity in the air.

"What … is this? What are you doing?"

He could hear the sea grinding away outside the warehouse and found himself staring upwards at the slats of moonlight in the roof, like he expected black water to come pouring in. The very night seemed to condense into pressing water and sharp salt, twisted by Veser's spell.

"It's sorta an all-purpose crowbar charm. Blunt force and wide range. If it doesn't work, we know we're dealing with something nastier than the charm-equivalent of a window."

Seawater crashed against the side of the warehouse, making the Detective jump. Veser looked up and grinned, eyes and teeth glowing out of the depths of his hood with an otherworldly light.

"Water cleanses, but it can also drown your ass. They don't call me a sea-witch for nothing."

The Detective swallowed hard and looked to Hanna, no longer doubting the half-selkie's expertise but still unspeakably anxious. Was this a smart decision? Could they have statements from other customers first before allowing a teenager to mess with the very fabric of what kept Hanna alive? All of his previous confidence was forgotten, replaced with the pathetic image of his partner and silent friend marooned in the middle of a spell circle, helpless and trapped in the dark.

But then, how was that different than their current predicament?

The tiny zombie, ushered into place by Veser slapping at his ankles, looked back at his partner blankly. He had nothing to say and the Detective couldn't bring himself to speak, or force Hanna to care about the amount of water involved in this. Submitting to what appeared to be fate, the Detective finally stepped back out of the circle and watched as Veser knelt at the front of the seal, lit all nine candles with a zippo lighter and raised his arms.

"Muir muir eslanatin protiferus malun, muir muir reacon finus."

The older man could feel the magic rising around him, the sea shifting restlessly in response. The air smelled salty and rich. It was different from what he'd felt with the djinn: less gauged towards total destruction. It felt … big, pressing, all-encompassing. Capable of either cocooning or crushing.

Hanna watched Veser's every single movement meticulously, as sucked into the spell as the selkie. Veser chanted them deeper and deeper into the circle, then threw a handful of powder into the divining bowl.

With the last word of the spell, the candles around them flared so brightly that the Detective grunted and flinched backwards. When the flare ended, the suddenly-green flames were burning so intensely they visibly ate through the columns of wax, candles burning lower and lower and lower like some awful movie sped up. The Detective felt the night air around him tighten dangerously; deep in his chest, beneath his staples and twisted skin, he felt the crash that Veser had promised.

On some cosmic plane, a crowbar met a window, but there was a vacuum inside the window and when the glass shattered, it tried to suck everything in.

Feet swept out from under him, the Detective fell down to the filthy boarded-up floor with a boom and held onto the ground. He barely managed to force an arm above his head to shield himself from any debris, black trench coat whipping violently around his legs. He looked up in time to see Hanna, lit a brilliant white by the circle, go up to the tips of his battered Vans. Every stitch-riddled limb was pulled taut by the power cocooning him, his bright blue eyes staring endlessly into the rafters of the warehouse. Veser was reduced to a crouching silhouette in front of him, shouting more spellwords above the roar.

Heart going high in his throat, the Detective kept himself from running or crawling into the circle only by the barest of willpower. He knew now, you didn't interrupt spells unless you particularly desired to mess everything up, but the splitting pain in his chest did a good enough job of keeping him pinned to the floor. The singular crackling gravity of the white circle seemed to have looped hooks into each of his staples, inflaming the black space beneath as it pulled and pulled and pulled at the bits of metal that kept him together.

The cyclone of power went on forever and a moment and the Detective watched with his hands crammed over his shaking chest, face twisted in pain. Then, like there was wire connected to every joint of him, Hanna convulsed at thirteen different angles and was slammed down to his knees, green fingers clawing at the glowing floor. His skinny form jerked and his mouth opened. It almost looked like the small zombie was breathing in until he jerked again and red fluid came bursting out of his mouth and down his chin. The Detective could hear the sharp splatter as it hit the floor, gallons of it, and something rolled to the side in the flow, covered with the slick dead substance.

The Detective barely saw Veser's skinny arm thrust into the circle to grab the crackling sphere out of the pool of red, but was up on his knees by that point, fighting towards Hanna's twisted form with all the strength left in his brainstem.

"Don't go into the circle, dumbass!" Veser shouted over the last of the noise, looking away and dousing his entire hand into the divining bowl with a roar of his own. The purified seawater in the bowl steamed and crackled, turning black. The green smoke curled up his arm, making his veins flare the same color.

Kneeling at the very edge of the circle, the Detective looked at Hanna's crouching form, frozen in place as the roar faded down to a whisper and the warehouse slowly materialized around them again. At last, the white faded from the rune circle and the water outside fell back to its heavy cling around the silty grey seabed. As the Detective watched, the blue light in Hanna's eyes went out and he slumped to the floor like a doll.

For a moment, there was only Hanna, motionless and dark on the floor, red soaking slowly and steadily into his oversized t-shirt as the electric lamp buzzed on and on and on.

"You killed him!" the Detective shouted hoarsely, the numbness fading from his skin only to be replaced with hard fear. His hands were numb as he struggled into the circle and grappled Hanna's upper half into his lap, looking fearfully at the looseness of his neck, the curl of his fingers.

"Are you fuckin' listening to yourself?" Veser snarled as he stumbled behind him, green eyes wide in abject horror.

It was obvious he didn't know what he'd just done and his hands were shaking too badly to pretend otherwise. His entire body crackled with fading power, making him fight not to hyperventilate. His left hand, badly burned, was held just behind his back, limp and useless, but the pain was totally overwhelmed by the fact he might have just killed someone. Again.

"Just-just shut up and watch, he'll come around. Just watch. He's got to." Veser craned fearfully over the older man's shoulder, then whimpered, "Come on, little dead dude. Come on."

"Hanna? Hanna."

The Detective said it like a prayer, willing some sort of movement into the limp young man draped over his legs. He ran his fingers over Hanna's back, his arms, his hair, not looking for warmth but some kind of _flicker_. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he would know it when he found it.

For minutes and minutes, he sat with his hand over the zombie's silent heart, waiting and fearing and hoping.

At last, Hanna made a small, weak noise and that sound made the magic breath come back into his body. Pressure finally voiding in his aching chest, the Detective said something relieved and nonsensical and the noise made the small zombie look up. The innocent blue light had returned to his eyes but was a bit less blinding, showing a little more of the cornflower corneas beneath. Very, very weakly, Hanna looked up at his partner and his cupid's-bow mouth drifted up at the edges.

"Hey."

It came out of his stained mouth as a bit of a gasp, but the older man forced himself to smile back to make up for it. The Detective put his warm hand on the tender space in between Hanna's bird-bone shoulder blades, feeling his back cool and dry underneath his shirt. They would throw the red-blotted shirt out. Never do this again. Quiet was better than inanimate. Unsure was better than nothing.

"You smiled."

"Really?" Hanna whispered, closing his eyes. His mouth tugged downwards. "That's… kinda funny. 'Cos I feel like I just barfed up my s-soul or something and that doesn't sound like … smiling material."

Hanna looked up and gave another weak smile, head lolling to rest against the Detective's red-stained leg.

"It's okay, Marcus. Wait. Heh. Guess that's … too close to your fake name, huh? I was going for, like, Marcus Aurelius but … eh. Oh jeez, my head."

Hanna was severely confused and nauseated. His partner could tell from the expression on his round face, which he had never seen before. No, he had never seen an _expression_ before now, only remnants of them. Never had 'like' made an appearance, either.

The Detective's frown tightened as he realized something was very, very different with the zombie on his lap – if not very, very wrong.

"Hanna?" he said cautiously, a world of apprehension and fear hidden in the two suddenly unfamiliar syllables. Rising to his stitched-up elbows, Hanna shook his head; the movement was more quick and sloppy than all of his other movements over the past two months all put together.

"Man, what hit me and can I hit them back? Seriously."

He groaned again and was staggering to his feet before his partner could stop him. Once upright, he lurched into the Detective's chest, accepting the support and fully absorbed in reeling from his head to his toes. All of it showed on his expression, the likes and intensity of which left his partner absolutely speechless.

"Oh, wow. I think I … feel better?"

"You feel?" the Detective managed to say, voice almost stricken, but Hanna didn't have time for him when he had just discovered himself. The zombie was patting at his own skinny chest, jaw cocked to the side, brows twisted, fingers knotted, eyes wide.

Then he pointed at his partner, amazement shining out of his very eyes as his mouth popped into an open grin.

"Wait. _Wait_. It's me! And it's you! And I can talk like I didn't know I wanted to and my god, hey, _wow_! Forget okay, I feel _great_!" he exclaimed and flung his hands out, voice going so high it cracked, which made the Detective flinch like it was a gunshot.

With that, Hanna looked down at himself again, patting down his stained shirt with a look that was disgruntled and curious and amused all at the same time, all of the emotions crowding his pointy green nose and blue eyes.

"Also still kind of dusty, though, and wugh that smell, is that me? I hope it's not but I'm sure we can like febreeze that away — for everything you can't wash there's febreeze huh and I'm pretty sure I'd melt in the washing machine or something and man speaking of washing machine when's the last time my clothes got run through and what was I thinking with this shirt, _seriously_."

A multitude of emotions tangled inside the Detective's chest, just under his heart and just above his gut, but he could do nothing but stare. The spectacle in front of him was almost too much to layer atop the wound left by the terror of the spell. It was like he was afraid that Hanna's round face was simply going to tear apart from so many expressions pulling it all different ways all at once and the shock and wariness showed on his own (comparably inflexible) face, making Hanna's own expression drop when he caught sight of him.

"Oh. God. I'm different," Hanna whispered, one hand to his quiet chest. The statement, so obvious and yet so necessary, seemed to stay in the dusty air between them, hemmed in by the absolute darkness of the warehouse. The zombie stared into his partner's blank face for a minute, then winced so hard it seemed to hurt him, voice tightening. "Do you still like me?"

"Yes," the Detective managed after a minute. For a moment, it seemed like that one word would be his last, then the faintest ghost of a chuckle steadied him. He laughed, and Hanna heard it.

The instant, _violent_ brightening on Hanna's face honestly disturbed him just as much as the spell had. It was like a video of the slow, incautious but steady-moving boy he had watched for months was suddenly sped up to an insane speed, complete with gibbering chipmunk voice.

And he realized it was _amazing_.

"Yes, Hanna. I like you. I like you very much."

"Oh. Man. Good," Hanna whispered so faintly, but the Detective could see the relief in his wide blue eyes and that sheer fact cut him at the knees in the greatest of ways.

"Hey, so, you're not dead. Go me."

Startled, the pair of investigators looked to the side to see Veser standing by the messy rune-circle, shaking out his hand, which looked a little blackened at the edges. He tucked it into his hoodie pocket before they could make a conclusion, jerking his chin towards the zombie. His grin was equal parts horrible teeth and ego.

"You still got all your stitches, kid?"

"For the love of – I'm not a kid!" Hanna grit out, face crumpling in the exact same way as it had when Conrad had doubted his age: it was like seeing a sketch fleshed out into full color, and the startling difference made the Detective laugh again from pure shock. Perking up like a puppy, Hanna looked over and grinned at the very sound, obviously forgetting the offense immediately. Veser took advantage of Hanna's distractible nature, which easily joined 'flighty' and 'over-eager' in the list of new traits the dead boy had accumulated in the last five minutes.

"Eh, whatever, you'll just spend the rest of your undead life looking like one." Veser shrugged, then wiped at his nose with his free hand. "Yeah, so, back to my totally awesome skills of magical deduction. You want the full diagnosis? It'll cost you fifty extra."

The Detective nodded, unable to take his eyes off of Hanna. Veser gestured grandiosely to the zombie.

"This dude here's totally been mind-sealed."

"Mind-sealed? You're certain. What was that thing that came out of him?" Hanna's partner asked tensely, knowing instinctively that the two were connected.

"It totally fucking disintegrated and nearly ate my hand in the process but it looked like a sealer. Someone probably sewed it into him to cement the spell but didn't think about the stupidity of putting it into his stomach or something."

Veser winced as he clenched his hand experimentally. Obviously it still stung and would require some bandages. Hanna studied his face, lower lip poking out slightly.

"Is your hand alright? I know dispelling sealers can be pretty bad," Hanna said worriedly, tugging at the hem of his stained shirt. His hand slipped into his pocket, presumably rummaging for a sharpie. "I know a few runes that can take the sting off, if you want."

Veser blinked at him, obviously getting used to the idea of addressing him directly as a person and not 'that zombie'. Hanna also seemed to 'remember' some really weird things for having a sealed mind. That, and he didn't let other people work hoodoo or charms or whatever on him. It was one of his things.

"Er, no, I'm … good. Thing is, you still have your memories, someone's just cutting them off," the sea-witch explained, sounding amazingly bored. He paused to pick at something in his awful teeth. "You just have to find a way to unlock 'em. Maybe time'll do it, but I don't think so. That shit was nasty. Oh, and this goes waaaaay fuckin' outta my magic-mojo domain, but if you find the right guy, you can totally bring him back."

"_What_?" The Detective exclaimed, eyes widening. He couldn't even focus on the news that Hanna still had his memories; the idea of reversing the young man's skin-tone to a pale peach was too much for him. "Bring back … Hanna? Bring him back to life?"

"Look at him, dude's like market fresh," Veser scoffed, gesturing offhandedly to the zombie. "He's only been in the ground for what, like, a year? That's cake. He doesn't even have any dry-rot. Someone dug him up real quick and did an expert job animating him. There'll be a really fucking messy scene when they pop him back, but he'll live."

"Man, I wanna be a real boy again." Hanna's face scrunched up, lip twisting, then he pointed at his partner and cried excitedly, "Pinocchio!"

"You are remembering things," the Detective said softly, overwhelmed by the sheer complexity in Hanna's expression.

There was a moment of mutual, over-awed staring before Hanna abruptly began hopping up and down, yelling _oh my god oh my god oh my freaking god_ and rattling the very floorboards despite his feathery weight. The Detective said it himself several times, but he really just _mouthed_ it because he just couldn't get the words out. He was just that _happy_, happy in a sharp and overpowering way like he hadn't been since he'd woken up alone in a forest, and then all of a sudden Hanna was in his arms, legs wrapping around his waist like the happiest little lemur in the world.

They clutched and hugged and laughed uproariously, the Detective still shocked by every little slam of bright brash sound out of the boy, all that volume and vibration and _force_ and so much will to live. Then they cracked their heads together and all of it stopped with a muffled noise. Hanna froze against his chest, then reluctantly leaned back and grinned in his partner's face, sheepish.

"Ur. Hi," he chuckled, voice very, very tiny. One hand crept up to ruffle at the back of his red hair.

"Hi," the Detective answered, grinning so hard it hurt as he put a hand to where he had slammed into Hanna's forehead. Hanna's nose wrinkled and he snickered, plopping his chin down on his partner's shoulder.

"Wooooow."

Again, they both looked over to where Veser stood, forgotten. His arms were crossed, incredulity and 'what the fuck now' skepticism in his highlighter green eyes. The half-selkie looked at the holey ceiling and waved his hand dismissively.

"Happy reunion with a heaping side of awkward. I'll just … get out of your incredibly gay hair, then, soon's you pay the bill. Use protection."

"Thank you. Thank you so much," the Detective breathed, pushing Hanna's curly head under his chin, who gave a noise that he would come to hear quite often in the future and know only as _gnee_.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Two hundred and fifty bucks."

Veser put his hand out imperiously and the Detective let go of Hanna long enough to fish five fifties out of his wallet, messily folding them into the kid's outstretched palm. He didn't even feel the money leave him. Veser saluted them and gathered the necessary stuff into his backpack as Hanna untangled himself from his partner, apologizing haltingly and ineptly for his over-exuberance. The sea-witch grabbed up the electric lamp and slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned to go, then he stopped, frowning.

"You gotta think, though. He's got a lot of stitches on him."

"He's dead," the Detective said. The awful sentence didn't even make a dent on his smile, but the next one did. "The stitches are probably from when the medical examiner …"

The Detective trailed off. Hanna's body had never been found. There would be no incisions that didn't occur before he died.

"Yeah, but stitches can tell you a lot 'bout what happened before you died. Maybe even how you died," Veser suggested, kicking the stub of a candle out of its wax-pile. "Too bad you don't have some guy, like a … you know like a morgue guy. He could probably tell you some kinda crap like that. Eh. Anyways. Catch ya later."

The sea-witch departed the warehouse with a boom of a door, leaving the Detective and Hanna alone in the dark with the black sea shifting restlessly below them, subdued but never absent.


	11. Second Stage of Grief

A/N: Man, no matter how much better Veser's existence is in this AU, it's still tinged with utter suck. I really loved writing this chapter, hope you like it too~

Oh god Lee. Leeeeeeeeeee. …The second stage of grief is anger, by the by.

OH and in case anybody's confused, Mr Hatch was the 'asshole' mentioned last chapter who raped Ves' mom and then subsequently got his 'head bitten off or some shit'. Basically, this AU twist is how the family would have functioned if Mr Hatch hadn't been the tyrannical driving force of it.

_Warnings: language, mentionings of sexual activities, Severe Selkie Sadness and a Bad Made-Up Name for Mrs. Hatch ERRR Mrs. Falun ERRRR Veser's Mom Yay_

* * *

Second Stage of Grief

* * *

"Hey, Lee. M'home."

Veser's keys crashed down on the counter, hoodie sloughed to the side like an oily skin as he kicked the door shut. Moonlight streamed in the un-shuttered window, lighting the kitchen a haunting under-sea blue. He chewed on his lower lip in the careful sideways way he'd learned to, bee-lining for the fridge. He was starving.

He opened the door and, yes. Tilapia from last night. Boss.

"Hey, Sharkbait. Where'd you go?" Lee called from the office, with some kind of soft rock playing in the background. Maybe that was the reason he sounded so far away. Weird. Veser scooped off a handful of the flaky white fish and sucked it down cold, snapping the Tupperware closed and tossing it back on the shelf.

"Y'know. Out."

Closing the fridge, he licked his fingers then his lips and fingered the wad of cash in his pocket. Nice haul, if he said so himself. His left hand hung at his side, bandaged up to the fingertips but he'd made it look like a simple band-aid with a bit of glamour. He didn't need Lee asking questions about all the weird injuries he got, since he wasn't technically supposed to be selling his magic. Or doing it at all. Within sight of other people, at least.

"You, uh… could've called."

Veser's mouth twisted, expression abruptly turning surly. Leave it to Lee to trash his good mood. And in the way only he could, of course.

It wasn't you _should_ have, but you could have. Veser hated it when the older man pulled that hazy you're-a-responsible-adult-and-I-trust-you-so-why-haven't-you-rewarded-my-faith guilt trip on him, probably because it actually worked. Lee didn't usually care where he went or how late he stayed out, but every so often he got soppy. Worried. Sad.

The thought of Lee watching the door while he was gone always made Veser feel at least a slight pang of regret, even if it was buried in a prickly nest of irritation. He was pretty much doomed by his own conscience to stay in the following night, which would find him kicking around and watching TV just to subliminally assure his guardian that he didn't belong to a gang or whatever. Christ. The hoola-hoops he jumped through for Lee.

Veser looked up when he heard the squeak of a computer chair and heavy footsteps in the hallway. A moment later Lee walked into the silent kitchen, pushing his lank light hair out of his eyes. The look on his handsome face, bedraggled and miserable and white, did not bode well.

"I thought maybe you…" His raspy, destroyed voice wasn't good either. The older man took a deep breath, like pulling the very air into his aching chest cost him something dear. His hands were shaking. "It's only been a few days and I thought—"

Shit, shit, shit. This. _Already_, Veser wanted to demand, but the truth of it was _at least he waited this long._

"You thought wrong. I'm okay. Seriously," the half-selkie grit out, then locked eyes with the defeated man standing in the doorway and sighed, scrubbing at his pinched face. "I got homework."

He dragged his feet into his room and threw down his backpack and, not bothering to turn on the light, collapsed in his old swivel-chair. He scowled.

It was his mom.

It had always been his mom, really, but that meant something completely different after the midnight visit from the police a week ago. When he said 'she died' to the guy and his pet zombie, what he meant was that she had been found washed up on the docks with her pelt wrapped around her neck like a noose. It hadn't disturbed Veser near as much as he thought it would, which really wasn't saying much, but Lee… Lee was another story. The empty vodka bottle under the counter was proof enough of that, because the man never drank. Lee was also pretty determined to foist his grief on him, which Veser really didn't find fucking kosher, especially considering his history with his mom.

Half-breeds weren't popular, never had been. Iena had made a science experiment out of how much water he could stand when he was like three days old. When it became pretty fucking obvious that she couldn't drown him but he was going to be landlocked for most of his life, she — or any other selkie really — wouldn't make the sacrifice. She found a way to keep him within arms-reach, on land, with a few selkie love-charms. What the seal-folk did best, really.

Pretty shitty of his mom, to enslave a random guy on the beach into being his nanny. Not to say she couldn't have heartlessly and non-partisan-ly picked a better guy to be his fake dad, even forgetting the whole cushy job and the extra bedroom because selkies didn't think about that money shit. But Lee was cool. Like, seriously cool. The best person in Veser's life, even if that category boasted a whopping three people.

His bedroom door opened behind him, slow and creaky and _tender_. Veser grit his sharp teeth. He kept his mouth shut until Lee was inside and had stared at him for a good minute, trying not to imagine the man's kind blue eyes watering like some kind of fucking Hallmark Moments poster-boy.

"Are you?" Veser heard the squeak as Lee sat down on his bed. The half-selkie kept staring at the wall, unimpressed. Lee clasped his hands over his knees and clarified hesitantly, "Okay?"

"Lee, seriously, don't start this shit with me," Veser said flatly, wheeling the chair around and kicking his feet against the desk, trying to look the picture of unconcerned. "Have I ever lied to you?"

"Maybe you've never had a reason to. Maybe nothing's been important enough before now," Lee said with a quietness that for some reason made Veser snap into a rage that was as loud and ragged as Lee was pale and quiet.

"Maybe _nothing_. Yeah, nothing, 'cos that's what it is! _Nothing_."

Nonsensical though it was, it was all he could grit out, voice raspy. All at once, he was digging his nails into his palms and aching to slam into something, but this wasn't the blustering rage that dissolved into tears. This was just anger. Just fucking anger, plain and simple, cavernous and hot and awfully clean. He hated the _anguish_ on the older man's face because it was that cold bitch's fault and she was ruining shit from behind the scenes again, killing Lee in the way only she could.

The she-selkie was the source of his freak-teeth and a cold tutor in the ways of the spooky sparkly Beyond, and here Lee was implying he should be crying his eyes out over her like _he'd_ obviously been doing for the past day? The past week? The thought made him curl up inside with rage, made him go a little insane, especially with the slow, mournful way Lee was rubbing at that fucking sealing mark on his left ring-finger.

"You know what, I'm glad she's dead!"

"Don't say that. Please," Lee said, voice quivering. One hand came up to rub at his closed eyes. "I know how it was. I know. I just… thought…"

Then his hands were back in his lap, long fingers worrying at the tattoo. It went all the way around, lacy and vaguely gaelic, like a wedding ring. In reality, it was a magical tracking device and a physical mark of his mom's charm-hold on Lee. It was so strong, she could even stop his heart through that same mark and answered unflinchingly when her son asked about it. No one ever said his mother wasn't an outrageous bitch, but Veser always found it convenient to have indisputable proof right under his nose.

Seeing Lee push at his shackles like that with his thin body bowed around it, like it was his lifeline to something beautiful that had gone too soon, made something lock up inside the half-selkie. Veser's skin went cold. His chest got colder yet. This was the moment that had been hovering for years — for as long as it took him to _realize_ that the look on Lee's face when Iena went back into the ocean wasn't just the result of a really boss stomachache — and it finally crested with a silent roar.

"Dude," Veser said evenly, clearly, flatly. His green eyes — his mother's eyes — bored into Lee's. "She never loved you."

Lee ducked his head.

"She never loved you and she was never _gonna_ love you. You were an easy lay and the only one stupid enough to go near a naked chick with a kid on the beach and _take_ it when she said so. I mean, who the fuck _does_ that?"

"Ves."

"She witched you. I fucking _saw_ her witch you," the half-selkie said, louder, accusing the dead woman even as he tried to get through to the best friend he'd ever had.

Not the first time, no, but he'd seen her put varnish on the spell every single fucking time she came to the surface and they suddenly _converged_ and became this creepy family with Lee. They went for walks and movies and kept up the whole 'separated parents' act to the city, as if everyone was watching. They took him to ice-cream parlors and laughed together, fingers laced like the frilly seam of a clam-shell, when he bit clear through the cone with one snap of his needle-teeth and sent the stuff slopping down the front of his overalls. The blond man had spent a handful of precious afternoons strolling down the street with his arm around Iena and his hand on Veser's head, and he always looked like he was orgasming constantly. Just, like, bliss.

Half of it was probably the spell at work, but Lee had always wanted a family. He had just never found the right woman… a fact that didn't change when Iena found him. Veser could easily imagine the original scenario: the awed, helpless, _devoted_ look on Lee's handsome all-American-boy face as he crested the top of the hill. He could see the sea-grass waving, see Lee as the tall man pushed it aside and stared in wonder at the naked silver-haired goddess on the beach, holding a small child with razor-sharp teeth in her arms.

She probably smiled at him, and that was all it took. He was gone. Gone Lee-on.

She came in from the sea four times a year, when the moon was full and the tide was high. Dragged her son and successor to the table. Made him learn shit. Gave him homework for the months she was going to ignore him and Lee.

The two of them, Iena and Lee, fucked after attending the music festival or the baseball game or the parade. Of course they fucked. Lots of selkie magic hinged on that carnal pact and had for hundreds of years and they were no exception.

So, for Veser, that meant lots of nights of plugging his ears and sinking into his fluffy mattress and wishing she would just fucking _go away_. Let him go back to the life he'd managed to carve out past the dirty frigid tide-pools of the bay, anchored among the sooty bricks and the weed-cracked cement sidewalks. The almost-friends he'd made, even if he just smoked pot with them.

Every time she came, she messed stuff up. She messed Lee up. She left him pining for her for weeks, left him sullen and not wanting to do the stupid shit that meant so much to him at that age, like tossing balls and bowling and other lame kid stuff. Those dry spells of two-fold abandonment let Veser know loud and clear which of the mother-son pair was more important to Lee. Right about the time he started to forget about his mom and the stinging feeling she left him with, she was back again, spell-book in hand.

Veser didn't want to learn magic, in the beginning. Maybe because he hadn't really realized that it was the only thing he was legitimately talented at. In the end, he only picked up voodoo because he knew how much it would piss her off. Never got a chance to make his grand reveal.

She died — was murdered and laid out on the docks – before he could. Happy fucking day, right?

"This is all a fucking _spell_, because she never loved you and you never loved _her_. She made you into her fucking _slave_, used you like a sex toy, tagged you like some animal and you're going to sit around and drag ass when you got a chance to actually get out of the spell and get a real life? Find someone who actually puts up with you and doesn't go for a swim every time you want to talk shop? How can you fucking _do_ that?"

For a moment, Veser's dark bedroom was saturated with bitter silence: the breathlessness before a dropped weight, embodied in the tenseness of Veser's foot on his desk, his clenched hands. He had been waiting to hear Lee's answer to this for years, equal parts harshness and desperation in his bright green eyes as he looked at his father. His guidance, his pillar, his teacher, his friend.

A bar of light from his bedroom window hit Lee across the face, paling him into a blue-washed ghost.

"Some things start with magic and go past them," Lee said at last, quietly, miserably. He looked up and in the lines of his face was a sorrow and a resignation so complete it dissolved the strength of his jaw and the warmth in his eyes. He was lost inside of himself and he'd burned the ladder. "I'm sorry, Ves. I can't help it."

For a moment, it was all Veser could do just to stare at him. Then he turned the chair with a disgusted shake of his head, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

"Fuck you, man. Seriously."

He meant to turn away and be done with it, closing off whatever hurt and fuck did it hurt, but this time his anger broke, sudden and choppy like grey arctic waves on shore. Veser took a deep breath, but when it came out, his throat was squeezed shut and he was crying. He jerked and bowed over and hissed into his sleeve and before he knew it, Lee was on his knees, warm arms wrapped around him, and he cried like a sissy but it wasn't because his mommy was dead.

He never had one to begin with, and now his dad was staring at an empty picture frame.


	12. Afternoon After

A/N: If someone will draw this image, I will do something ridiculous for you.

RIDICULOUS.

_Warnings: language, referenced sexual conduct, Horribly Short Chapter_

* * *

Afternoon After

* * *

Conrad woke up the next morning feeling like someone had drilled into his skull with a dull tin spoon and stuffed his prefrontal cortex full of cotton soaked in chloroform.

His body creaked, feeling like a flat grey puddle slopped on top of something too soft to hold him. Memories battered at him, fuzzy and incomplete, until he remembered a bright, round bit of blue perched between two clawed fingers. Well fuck, he thought thickly, dearly hoping that wasn't one of those fabled 'life decisions' that lurked in people's older years. If it was, he had most certainly failed the test.

The young coroner stared blearily at the ceiling, then feeling-remembering-sensing a skinny, sprawled presence to his right where the white tide of narcotics had left it twelve hours ago, he closed his eyes as quietly as he could.

It didn't work.

"You were … fuckin' nuts last night."

Biting his lip, Conrad sighed. Of course. Just … of course.

"Don't tell me," he murmured hoarsely, putting a hand to his head and grimacing as if shocked to find it still intact. Considering all that had gone on inside of it the previous night, it was a pleasant surprise. Now he just had to check and see if all of his nerves were still hooked up to the right parts of his brain after that switchboard swap of their little drug party, which he still couldn't believe _happened_.

He had never been that high before. Of course he'd tried pot once (amidst a lot of choking and recurrent fear over his _possibility_ of asthma) and it was … interesting, but oxycodone was hard stuff. Real hard. He went to a whole other planet. Couldn't remember anything but flashes.

Luce, obviously, faired a bit better when it came to retention. Otherwise, Conrad assumed, half of his life would have been a senseless blur.

"You were whinin' like crazy, goin' 'aw daddy, aw daddy _ride_ me' and howlin' … and uh, some other shit. 'N stuff."

Voice as slow and rough as a puttering chainsaw, Luce seemed to run out of steam and words rather quickly, teasing falling flat prematurely. An unreal silence settled over the bed, just exhausted and apathetic enough to be comfortable. Conrad thought about what he'd just heard, completely failed to turn red or indignant, then just turned over.

"No."

"Yep," came the rebuttal at his back, simple and stupid. Maybe Luce wasn't as lucid as he wanted to believe, and Conrad took a little bit of muzzy pleasure from that fact.

"If I can't remember it, it didn't happen," Conrad stated groggily, hiding his head in his not-as-soft-as-it-was-last-night pillow. Besides, he could tell if they'd had sex. There would be … signs. Painful signs. His ass was — well, wait, there _was_ a part that stung a bit, but he would look at that later –

"Yer no fun," Luce huffed, mischief balloon obviously popped. Reduced to a very, very foggy blur of yellow-white skin in Conrad's periphery, the vampire glowered at the ceiling before admitting sullenly, "Y'just sorta fell down and giggled a bunch. 'Least yer consistent in yer lameness."

"Truer words," Conrad sighed heavily, then reached for his glasses, which had somehow (Luce?) made it onto his bedside table. It was close to noon, if the sunlight bashing its head against the curtains was any indication of how long they had slept. He rubbed at his eyes and glanced at his iPhone, humming and happily charged on its stand. 3 p.m.

Christ, when was the last time he'd slept in till three?

"I need to go to work," he said to no one in particular, falling backwards with enough force to maybe knock the last of the leaden sluggishness from his body. It didn't work. He stared glumly at the ceiling. Luce, still unmoving, grunted to his right.

"Good. I need sleep. Can't do it with you makin' so much goddamn racket over there."

"Racket?" the coroner repeated incredulously, not quite thinking about the fact that Luce was implying he was going to _stay_ after he left. Or was ushering him out of his own house. Dickhead.

"Breathin' n shit," Luce said, disgust evident in his voice, like he was talking about someone singing Mamma Mia at the top of his lungs at seven a.m. "It's only 'till you don't need ta do it anymore that ya realize how pointless and exhaustin' breathin is. And annoyin'. Every fuckin second like a drum er Chinese water torture er an alarm er some shit. _Christ_."

That was enough to get the coroner moving. Swinging his legs over the side of his bed, Conrad shook his head somewhat hopelessly and left Luce to the fragments of a rant that had obviously been festering for a decade or two. Trying not to hustle his naked ass into the bathroom in a strangely acute bout of self-consciousness, the coroner took a shower and got the last of the scummy medicine taste out of his mouth, finishing by spritzing some cologne over his pressed scrubs. Once he actually got on his feet, it was surprising how good he felt; he really did feel awake and clean, and he didn't give his medicine cabinet more than a passing glance.

The coroner was conscientiously folding up the cuffs of his undershirt when he came back into his bedroom. He looked up and had to stop in his tracks, eyes widening a little behind his glasses.

The sun was pressing against the red curtains and driving Luce to lethargy, weighing his skinny, naked form into the rumpled sheets in a particularly violent sprawl. The image struck Conrad as so unique and visceral that he had to get a legal pad and a pen. He collected them as quietly as possible and crept back into his bedroom, grabbing a decorative chair he had possibly never sat in before. He stared intently until he felt confident enough to make his first line: the crook of the vampire's white, caving hip.

He scratched away for ten minutes before the vampire opened his cranberry eyes, sniffing disdainfully.

"You tryin' again with that faggy art stuff? Ain't one'a yer fuckin pet corpses, puppy."

"Considering the time you've spent in my morgue, you have no room to talk," Conrad said a little cheekily, sketching the dinosaur rise of Luce's ribs, horrible and gaunt. He shifted the paper to the side to get the scribble of his half-pained, irritated, _exhausted_ expression just right. Then the angle of his knife chin, his knobby ankles.

"But this dead man kin shove that pen up yer ass," came the muffled, listless reply, low and sleepy enough that Conrad let it pass without as much as a flinch.

After another minute, Luce rolled over just to spite him, but Conrad had already gotten what he wanted. He rose and admired the sketch for a moment (god, how rarely he did that) before placing it on his dresser, grabbing his keys and giving the comatose vampire another look.

"You can stay here today," he decided suddenly, feeling unexpectedly benevolent or maybe just stupid. Luce grumbled roughly, putting a clawed hand over his head.

"Did I fuckin' ask you, peaches?"

Conrad passed by the curtains and rustled them. It was definitely a ruthless winter midday; reflected light glanced off the walls, muted but still painfully white. Luce flinched away from the glare and ordered sharply into the pillow, "Pull the goddamn shades tighter."

"What do you say?" Conrad asked, feeling a little brave with his hand on the drawstring even as he knew he could never, ever _in a million years_ pull it.

"Pull the shades or I sink my fuckin' teeth inta every single one'a yer faggy foo-foo couch pillows," Luce threatened flatly. He burrowed further into the rumpled bed, then took a heavy and unnecessary breath. What came out next was soft, tired and so muffled by the pillow Conrad wasn't even sure it happened. "C'mon. I'll be good er whatever. Gimme a break, love."

Conrad smiled and complied, one brow creeping up at the strangest nickname he'd heard all month.

"Good puppy," he said almost cheerfully, grabbing his iPhone and slipping it into his pocket and giving Luce's sunken, scarred back one last, almost _fond_ glance. "Your coat is in the laundry room, if it didn't dissolve in the washing machine. Don't leave through the front door. I don't want my neighbors thinking I'm boarding a hobo."

Worth snarled, but his defiant middle-finger was lost on the walls: Conrad was already out the door and off to work, a slight and beautifully unexpected spring in his step.

He'd gotten high last night and there was a man in his bed for the first time in years. A man who was doomed to be a monster, admittedly, but who fought against his very nature to be _less_ of one. And Conrad had managed to get him and his disgusting coat into warm water, all in one night.

Somehow, the lingering scent of detergent included, this felt like the start of something not outrageously horrible.


	13. Better Prospects

A/N: Okay, I'm really reaching here. Anybody who knows anything about Australian culture around 1900, the turn of the century, oh please god help me if I'm being balls-crushingly ridiculous. I'm probably misusing the hell out of slang and racial slurs (HEY I LOVE OFFENDING PEOPLE), but I'm trying.

The tone in this is so awful. Worth's voice just doesn't CARRY without that one classic curse-word to toss around like ketchup. Grrnnh.

Really fond of this concept. There will be a second half explaining the rest. Also, there's a reason Luce likes to call Conrad peaches :] He probably shouldn't, but he does.

Things You Need to Know: anything you don't recognize is most definitely Aussie slang, snuff is a common tobacco-cocaine mixture popular in the 1800's, I'm pretty sure bleeding was still considered a fairly good medical practice in 1900, and Australia gained a fair amount of new crops from traders from China. And cockie means farmer. Think about the geography of it and stop looking at me like that.

How do you say 'minimal internet research' in Australian? I fail, that's how.

_Warnings: language (as in, it's written really badly agghhhh), drug-use, flashback, stupid middle names and way too much exposition_

* * *

Better Prospects

* * *

Luce didn't know he was going all the way around the world just to get to America, much less that it wouldn't look like much more than the inside of a shoddy old tanker.

He was right lucky to catch the freighter when he did and lucky only to be caught himself when they were too far away from shore to toss him off. Didn't have the tender to pay his way, but he scrubbed the decks well enough. They curved around the tip of Africa, making only one stop at a colony. His trip around the world consisted of relentless spans of hyper-blue ocean and steaming heat and peeling skin and rations that would have found anybody else hauling their bones along the top-deck on their hands and knees. In all honesty, Luce had never minded food much one way or the other, shortage or plenty, so long as he had his fags.

He had skipped out just in time to miss the 'commonwealth of Australia' becoming a reality, not that he cared. After thirty-two years of pushing against the establishment, he was too busy plotting out an insane plan that would land him with his own practice in a land that didn't know any better. If he played it right, they wouldn't be able to tell him from Benjamin Franklin.

It was almost too easy, when he thought about it. He was obviously one of the first Aussies to come through and they didn't know what to do with him. It was like he was some exotic, gaunt breed of bird that they didn't know whether to kill for its plumage or keep for breeding purposes. Or if either was worth getting close enough to his razor-sharp beak.

The blokes at the immigration booth (a sad shack on the oily docks, clotted from all sides by shipments of outgoing cotton) were so stumped by his accent that Luce was able to shout them down and get properly bloody agro about losing his medical license in the swap from Australia, just like he'd planned. He waggled his stitched-together passport under their noses in a way that made them grateful he wasn't punching them down and that was enough to get him through. One stickybeak tried to rummage into his things, but Luce sent him packing quickly enough with a boot to the coins.

They drafted him up a temporary license — first one he'd ever gotten but damn well not the first one he'd ever deserved, even if it looked like as much of a hack as he was — and it was practically a bull auction from there on out. Word got sent out on horseback that a doctor from a far-off land was looking for a nice town to put him up after a journey all the way across the world. Shouts came in from all over, mostly small towns looking for a way to curb their infant mortality rate or just get another medal on their belt.

The newborn Southerner closed his eyes and pointed at a map and was riding down in a wagon a day later to a nice little encampment called Sweetwater Creek, located in Georgia, North America. A neat little house was even provided for his use, since the other appointed Doc had croaked en route, and it was damn charitable of him to fill those shoes, now wasn't it. There was already a placard with his misspelled name on it hanging from the porch, along with a loaf of bread and a small child who sang him something shrill and then ran off. It was a regular small-town welcome, starched and pressed and white-washed, which assured him the rest of the populace would be by in time to pay their respects to their medical savior.

Five nights later, Luce Darnall Worth, new PhD and full-bred yobbo, wiped the last of the snuff off on the very tips of his long fingers and finished it with a curt snort. Sighing slowly through his mouth, the man let his bony back sag against the chair until the white rush started creeping up his limbs and softening his ribs, studding the dark of the little house with a citrus richness that winked in his periphery.

Christ, he needed that. The thin, sprawled man gave a lethargic glance over to his battered razor box, then forgot it. One at a time. Spent too long on that goddamned boat to die now, or bleed most of the powder out.

Luce drifted for a while behind his desk, just breathing deeply so he could feel his rafter rows of ribs expanding and folding like the spines of a bat's wings. Billions of awful things screeched outside in the balmy night, going _cree-cree-cree_ in a way that made him bloody grateful that he didn't sleep until he was so tired he couldn't see or hear shit. The new doctor looked blearily around his new home, fuzzy gaze oozing over the dried herbstuffs and powders he'd brought with him from overseas. Regular stand-bys, reliable and uninteresting as the old mismatched glass bottles they sat in.

What did eventually manage to catch Luce's interest was a basket near his freshly-carved desk, stacked high with sweet little orange things.

The meticulously-woven basket had been ferried to his doorstep that morning by a child so frilly she looked like a sweet, all pastel greens and ruffles and a sugar-spun bonnet. Luce reached over and palmed the topmost fuzzy globe between his long-fingered, peeling hands – able to feel every little hair thanks to the humming light behind his eyes – then bit into it. Sweet yellow juice slipped down his chin and beneath his shirt. He couldn't help but snort as it glazed his sunken collarbone like a bloody tart, electrifying his dry mouth.

He'd had one of them before, but only one, and they'd taken the pit from him afterwards to stick in the ground. The cockie chink brought it in before they ran him out of town. Called it a _tao zi_. A peach.

It only took him that one scrawny orange lump to realize he bloody loved peaches.

Now he had all he could eat, thanks to the charitable populace of Sweetwater Creek, Georgia, North America. He couldn't help but think it again, reorienting himself all the way across the ocean from his dry, red home. Luce gave another smirk as he turned it over in his hand. Georgia peaches were different than the sad, under-watered pulp he'd had back home. More seductively helpless, unhardened by the plains and salty heat of Australia. Christ, they practically fell apart in your hand. He took another mushy mouthful before it could, chewing mechanically.

The ladies of Georgia were too sweet and too soft and too pink, just like their peaches.

They tended to flutter and go faint at the smallest of things. After a lifetime of the thin, unyielding frames of Aussie women, they seemed like great powdered birds, flopping everywhere, leaving lacy handkerchiefs like molted feathers. After living a few years amongst the chiseled, dark nudity of the aboriginals, Luce was also accustomed to wearing minimal amounts of thin clothing, if just to escape the heat, but then the mayor of the small settlement town came to check up on their new resident doctor when Luce was shaving. He was in nothing but his trousers, which was more than enough as far as he was concerned, but the way the mayor's wife squeaked and averted her powder-blue eyes told him well enough that shirtsleeves were mandatory when dealing with the big folk.

He was just so damn used to being naked. He was used to squatting in the red dirt with a pair of tiny blood-gummed scissors in one hand as the aboriginal kids gibbered in their sing-song, clicking language around him. He'd gone to the wandering tribes when the settlement bastards kept tossing him around about his license, refusing to accept his years of practice as any proof of his legitimacy. He was bloody thirty at that point and didn't see the point in bits of paper saying you could do shit you already knew you could do. But he was nearly a bush-kid himself and didn't go to any of their fancy schools, and that was all they needed to hear: the most they'd give him was a nurse position and Luce Worth was no bloody nurse, so he went to be a doctor somewhere else.

The bushmen didn't trust him at first, but they learned to after he saved their chief a lot of trouble with a few basic remedies — and it pissed off the higher-ups back at home camp to have someone helping the abos, so really Luce couldn't have been happier. There was no money involved — couldn't help but admire the tribes for that — but he wasn't a charitable organization and foodstuffs were enough payment for him. Eventually he became something of a pet gubba among the tribes he frequented and the tykes made a game of trying to mess with him, seeing if they could get him to put any white-man spells on them with his metal instruments. Occasionally they snuck in close enough to draw their pudgy black fingers over his craggy bare shoulders and back, tracing the swarm of scars there, which pissed the fiery hell right out of Luce when he was trying to work.

Scarification was a ritual in their culture, something awful to be endured to become a full-fledged member of the tribe. Luce had watched a few rites, once he got in snug enough with the Danggali: he watched them take a stone shard (covered in a white powder and so blunt it made him wince) and make cuts over the ebony shoulders and chest and soft caving belly of a tyke who just barely managed not to cry. If he cried, he went into exile for the next day, and they tried again the next night. Relentless, that people, just like the outback.

It looked like the kid was bleeding all over, with the way the roaring fire caught his sweat and then his slowly seeping blood. Turned him into flickers of crimson on black oil. His entire body gaped against the starry sky like a shapeless vacuum out of which maturity would writhe up and crawl out, rending his skin apart and leaving behind a gasping man when the wounds closed.

There were some who didn't go through with the ritual for fear of the pain, called clean-skins. They couldn't trade or even pitch in on tribal events proper, and yet the strange pale witchdoctor with the yellow hair who visited their tribe was covered with scars, like sloppy dashes on a hyena's hide. They had a name for him that they tossed among themselves. Luce was fairly certain the translation came close to 'bloody idiot who can't stay out of the thorn brush' but he never bothered to learn much Danggali, and they seemed to understand him pretty well when he shouted loudly enough and gestured with sharp objects.

They missed him when he went, fair dinkum, even if they couldn't understand his nasty habits with blades.

Bleeding was good for you. Cleaned the system. Didn't see how it mattered, anyhow. Told a pretty Georgia sheila (she caught him in his singlet) that he'd got his off of aboriginal rites … right before he went to the shop around the way and picked up a long shirt-sleeve. They might help him get under skirts, judging from the terrified and intrigued and utterly _compelled_ look in her eyes, but the less questions the better now.

Finishing off the last of the peach, Luce tossed the gnarled pit to the floor, smearing at his sticky yellowed mouth with the bottom of his sooty singlet. The snuff had kicked in proper, but his bloody eyes ached. The whole settlement was an alien world to him, comprised of clean silvery wood set at ninety-degree angles and green little gardens.

He had never seen so many pale colors, either. His palate was permanently set in the dirt: reds and muddy ochres and flat browns and the grey of old campfire ash. This much white just unnerved him, especially when it stretched out for bloody ever in the cotton fields, aboriginal-looking blokes with droopy trousers and hats stepping among the rows and bloodying their black fingers on the pristine puffs as the wet heat rose up and up and up.

Luce was incredibly at home in a constant state of unwashed and sweaty, bony frame streaked with fireside grease and dirt. The soles of his feet were leather and felt awful in shoes. Felt naked without the dirt between his toes. When the ladies dropped by (and believe it, they did, gloved hands already pressed in awe to their little button mouths as they gigged shrilly when he called them puppies and shielas and dandies with a sly jerk of his chapped mouth), all the lofty, cloying scents got mixed up in Luce's sharp nose. They clouded the front of his brain and gave him headaches that likely had more to do with not getting enough snuff than anything. It confounded him, maybe made him wonder how he was going to survive in this dangerous new outback with all these expectations around him, built as presumptuous and sturdy as his little house.

He didn't really know if they were going to let him touch them, as religiously as they washed and perfumed, even if they were bleeding out their arses. Or, more ridiculous, if they were going to expect him to clean up and nod away like a good Josh. The thought of wearing more than one layer made his heat-blasted skin crawl; suspenders looked like misfired torture devices and the concept of wool alone had him cursing.

Luckily, they seemed to take his strangeness as yet another mark of his exotic competence, for now. They'd get used to it. Realize those dirty fingers would be clean when they needed to be. He needed these folk to trust him if he was going to take blades to them. If they whinged, he could be sniffed out and shipped back and then there would be nothing for him anymore: that cross-ocean voyage had cleared out a space inside of him and scraped it clean, and there was no going back. The whole ordeal was pretty bloody shonky, but he was willing to shut up and act otherwise. At least, until something else happened, and that's the way he'd always been.

Luce squinted at the ceiling when he heard the heavy wooden door open, sounding so much farther away than the modest twenty paces to the front of his shop. He grinned hazily. Shop. He had a bloody shop.

What the hell was the world coming to, if a hack like him could get a shop?

His first instinct was to tell the nong to sod off, but he at least had the head about him to remember he was supposed to be making nice here. Maybe it'd be the mayor's son-in-law and sucking up would be a little easier if he gave him a little something for whatever stomach pain he had. Christ, these ninnies whinged about everything. Hides like spun sugar.

"You right?" he called out hoarsely, leaning back on his chair and propping his bare feet against the desk. His dirty toes wiggled and clenched, long and almost monkey-like. "Bloody late, mate."

Dragging his bleary eyes from the distracting embellishments in the wood of his desk, the doctor watched sleepily as his visitor shuffled into his shop very, very slowly and a tad sideways — or maybe that was just the powder talking again. The bloke had a long coat on and a hat, both made of scraggly brown material. Strange dress around those parts, from what Luce had been able to see. His paws, gloved up despite the warm night, were shaking something awful.

Luce frowned as he got to his feet, half from the concentration of doing so under the haze of the snuff, then picked his way over to him, one hand pushing at his viciously receding hairline. When he got close enough, the stranger tugged up his collar and bent like he was inspecting the doctor's medicine cabinet.

"You come from across the ocean," the man said, voice low and raspy enough to grind cherrywood flat. Luce blinked, scrubbing at his hair in earnest as he thought some about nits, and maybe that he had them again.

"That I do. Jus' last week," the doctor grunted. He popped his neck absently. "Whoss'yer pain?"

"I need … your help."

He sounded utterly sure of it despite the strange pause. Christ, with that rumble he sounded like he had diphtheria, which made Luce almost back up a pace. He'd seen way too much of that back at home. The pile of coat and hat turned toward him a tad, and the wiry man could feel eyes drilling into his chest.

"You know the way of the people over there. You're a witchdoctor."

Luce's mouth twitched until he was sort of grinning. Fine, if they wanted a story. Maybe he'd even smear a few ash symbols on his chest before he started surgery the first time. They wouldn't know runes from chicken-scratch here, and he knew just the ones he shouldn't do to avoid actual spell-stuffs.

Granted, he wasn't a hard believer, but there was skepticism and then there was just plain baiting the shark.

"Ain't certified, but I picked up a few things, right 'nuff. Thought it'd be helpful," Luce said off-handedly, tossing up one of his best surgery knives and catching it, just fuzzed enough to be impressed by both his own skill and the heady end-over-end swirl of the shiny instrument. "Most things do better with a sharp knife and some greens, though. Now whoss'yer—"

He turned easily, but the man's clumsy gloved hand was reaching for his painstakingly unorganized and shifty collection of old glass bottles. The doctor's hackles shot up instantly, cutting through his haze right straight. Playing nice be damned, Luce just didn't like people — particularly uneducated nobs who interrupted his snuff time — messing with his shit.

"Ey, ey, ey! The hell're you on about, y'don't come in and nose around a man's —"

Luce grabbed for his wrist, then stopped mid-sentence as he realized how bloody _cold_ the bloke was under his palm: the chill soaked right to his joints.

Turning in his grip, the man looked up, sallow face emerging from the brim of his hat. Two bulging red irises glinted up at Luce out of the darkness. A sliver of sharp white peeked past the man's lip, sending a shiver of uncomprehending, alien terror down the doctor's spine.

"Chris' almighty." Luce swallowed, voice nothing more than a ragged whisper. "Wot the hell're y—"

Too fast to see, the man's arm moved. The next and last thing Luce felt was something crashing into his temple, and he hit the new wooden floor like a sack of flour, scalpel clattering out of his hand and rolling into a corner. It fell to a stop next to a barely-glistening peach pit, which would be found as a lump of dried brown wrinkles by the time another small child dropped by the house in the morning to find it empty, all trace of the doctor gone as if extracted with a dull knife.


	14. Accident Prone

A/N: He's baaaack! And, unfortunately, so are his friends. Don't you hate it how, the second you get your personality back, all those old bogies come out of the woodwork and leave ominous hints about the person you might have been when you were alive?

Me too.

(OH GOD HANNA SO CUTE GLLLK my heart is permanently three sizes bigger. Special thanks to RaeHimura who saved my ass on this one and had to edit it like three times!)

Warnings: language, CAST EXPANSIONNNN, Awful Poetic Waxing on the Wonder that is Hanna Cross and fff plot oh yeah.

* * *

Accident Prone

* * *

When the Detective woke up the next morning, he had a migraine and a heavy ache in his chest, right underneath his scar.

Most worrying of all was the awful impression that it had all been a dream. The warehouse, the sea-witch, the _news_ and the change in Hanna, all of it. Clustering with the gloom in the tiny bedroom, the possibility weighed the Detective into his thin sheets until he heard a clattering from the kitchen. Frowning, prepared for the worst (namely, a blank stare and a wordlessly proffered plate of black toast), he got up and padded into the threadbare living room.

As per usual, Hanna was in the middle of some unspeakable burnt-encrusted-splattered wreckage — except that the tiny zombie's green face was split by a lopsided white grin and he was wearing a raggedy blue apron that he had obviously rescued from somebody's donation pile.

"Hey! Good morning!"

Hanna threw another grin over his shoulder, oversized hands plucking and prodding and flapping over the powdery battle scene on the counter, clearly trying to make something and clean it up at the same time. The Detective stood in the doorway, barefoot and blinking blearily.

"You're up! Finally! Well, finally is kind of dramatic, you usually get up at like 7:50 on the dot, which is a really weird time to get up, but it's 8:12 now and I couldn't hear anything so I was really thinking about going in and checking on you? But I guess you're old enough to know how to get to work on time, haha, so I was going to make you breakfast like usual but I wanted it to be something awesome because of you know, the fact that I didn't die again and stuff, so I was like _hey, French toast_, that sounds pretty cool even though I can't remember what it tastes like! So I started to and then we ran out of eggs and I read online that vegetarians — er, uh, vegans or something, the ones who think animal juice is creepy — they make this kind of fake egg from oil and cornstarch and water so I tried making it but then we didn't have any cornstarch so I used baking powder and some yellow food coloring and then it wasn't mixing and I—"

Finally realizing that the more he talked, the wider his partner's eyes got, Hanna trailed off, looking immensely embarrassed. He bit his lip, then reached back on the counter and thrust a plate of perfectly blackened toast at him.

"Maybe they'll have donuts at the station," he offered in a ridiculously hushed voice as baking powder goo dripped languidly down his tattered apron.

The Detective barely kept from laughing out of awe alone, and only stopped himself because of how Hanna would likely take it. Hanna, who _had feelings to be hurt_, or at least who seemed vulnerable to embarrassment. Instead, he took the plate with a grateful nod and a thank-you, which made Hanna light up like a Christmas tree. Staying perfectly still, the zombie watched avidly until his partner took a considerable and alarmingly crunchy bite out of his breakfast, then made that strange _noise_ again and skittered back to his pots and pans.

Already the dingy, dripping apartment seemed brighter. The Detective's kitchen had never been so full, bursting with noise and movement and there was something naturally great about that, even if it would require hours of cleanup. The older man was still smiling lopsidedly, hardly able to cope with the amazement he was feeling, when Hanna sent him packing out the door with an improperly-mixed powdered drink and an enthusiastic wave and a command to "file lots of reports and catch lots of bad guys and bring home the bacon or whatever, Petrucchio! Oh, and watch out for that mean-looking guy with the moustache! He's like, ehrhhh!"

Whatever that meant, even though the dinosaur-clawing motions at the air helped a little.

The Detective's happiness didn't ever really _end _(three very kind and attractive coworkers asked him what he was smiling about), it just was dampened by his responsible nature. He'd only gotten halfway through his fairly mundane day of filing and running messages back and forth before he started thinking about what the sea-witch had said last: how stitches could be like a map of how a person died. That would be valuable with Hanna, maybe. His memories, no matter how amazing, weren't any good locked-up, but finding out his cause of death could be one more step to figuring out what was happening before he died. No matter how gruesome the concept was, it seemed like the only clear step forward.

It simply baffled him how they had been connected with Conrad for so long and yet had never seen this option: a classic case of forest-for-the-trees, he supposed. When he got back to his apartment, Hanna popped up over the couch and greeted him with a shout that nearly made him drop his things. He was perturbed again by the zombie's unexpected effervescence even as it shocked a smile onto his face.

When he mentioned going to see Conrad to get him diagnosed, however, Hanna's response was anything but positive.

"No way!"

Hanna seemed shocked that _he_ seemed shocked, then stuck his grey-pink tongue out and made an impatient, twisty expression.

"Well, I mean, like … yeah, I _guess_, but later! Later, Caesar! There's so much cooler stuff we could be doing now!"

The Detective could hardly see what the difference was between doing it now or later, but Hanna's brightening face told him there was a very, very big difference. The young zombie started rambling again, spouting something to the tune of _hey Fitzgerald lighten up, I don't want to think about that right now, I want to do something fun! Something that says HEY I'M ALIVE even though I'm kind of not! Let's go tip cows or teepee trees or something amazing!_

Or go to a movie, as the case was. As a tangental representative of the city law, the Detective couldn't rightly be seen teepeeing trees, and he was relatively sure there weren't any cows around. Still, the end result made Hanna _happy_ and the adjective actually fit on him now, no longer a sad grey presumption.

It was at night, an eleven p.m. showing of a noisy, high-dollar action flick that Hanna decided he would have looked forward to if he'd known about it. Before they left the apartment, the Detective had reached for a big, concealing coat only to realize Hanna had already breezed past him and was waiting at the flimsy door, bony green arms swinging in plain sight at his sides. It made him stop and frown, if just at the shift of their equilibrium. Maybe it wasn't really his place to decide how Hanna disguised himself anymore, even though he'd already begun to worry about Hanna's apparent lacking in the _caution_ department after only twenty-four hours of the real him.

In the end, he just shrugged and went along with it, and people really didn't seem to notice them. Between Hanna's quick, distracting movements and loud voice and his partner's mysterious ability to disappear in people's peripheries, they managed quite well.

It was only when he was settled in the inky darkness of the movie theater, Hanna propped up beside him on his vans like a meerkat in his squeaky theater chair with his wide eyes glued on the screen, that he was finally able to think, _wow_.

This is Hanna Cross.

Hanna kicked his feet in movie theater chairs. Hanna slapped his hand along railing bars. Hanna gasped at large flashes of color and made muffled noises when something popped up on screen, absently reaching for his partner's popcorn. He even put a buttery handful to his mouth before he stopped, stared at the food, then threw the Detective a painfully sheepish look and scattered the little yellow tufts onto the sticky movie-theater floor. This Hanna simply couldn't stop moving, whereas his other self never really moved unless necessary. The Detective honestly hoped he wouldn't tire out whatever spell was keeping him animated. At the rate he was wiggling and running, it was a legitimate concern.

Most of all, this Hanna talked and _touched_. Grabbed his hand, yanked at his shirt, even played footsie with him with an intensity that said he was just so damn glad to be alive, except he wasn't. His bright red hair had always seemed strange before, but now it fit perfectly, a visual sign of the fire blazing at his core. The Detective could believe there was an entire life of memories locked inside of him, humming just below the surface, playing his stitches like guitar strings.

His long fingers were sticky; they caught on the slightest tips of things, like shirttails and ties. It was like some kind of ticklish magnetism hovered over his green skin, drawing everything toward him. Paperclips, glances, fireflies, people. Things certainly fell on him a lot more at home, probably because he was moving faster, but the Detective couldn't shake the feeling it had so much more to do with _Hanna_.

Yes, this was the _real_ Hanna Falk Cross, paranormal investigator, siphoned straight out of his battered laptop and ejected onto the dirty streets of the city — and he hit the ground running.

After the flick was over (and most of the cast lay dead or snug in bed with the other members of the cast), they exited the movie theater from the back door. The night was quiet and crisply cold all around them, evidenced in the milky white wisping from the Detective's mouth. His content smile seemed permanently branded on his face, warmth and assurance reaching all the way down to his toes as they walked around the large concrete building. Hanna kept hopping several steps ahead of him, yabbering all the while about the awesome action effects and the stunts and the explosions and the _waveriders_, man, the _waveriders_. All seemed right in that moment, if not in the world at large, so of course the calm wasn't long in lasting.

Quieting mid-sentence (the Detective would learn that these were the most common kind of interruptions for Hanna, if just because he was constantly talking), Hanna abruptly stopped walking and straightened up to the tips of his toes as if someone had poked him in the small of the back.

"That feels funny," the zombie said suddenly, almost curiously, as if he didn't quite believe it himself. The Detective looked at him and frowned. Then he glanced around the alley suspiciously, lingering in particular on overturned trashcans and a looming dumpster. He had long become accustomed to the fact that the night was rarely as calm as it seemed.

"What does?"

"On my back. Something just … tingled?" Hanna asked the alley at large, disappointed when the bricks gave no answer. He frowned up at the sliver of moonlight above them. "It's happened before, too. I wonder what it means."

"Do you want me to check?" his partner asked, not knowing what else to do — and they couldn't afford not to check out every new thing happening to Hanna. Despite himself, a small twinge of anticipation crept into his shoulders. New wasn't necessarily good, but it was something.

Hanna seemed to consider his offer for a moment, then nodded and, turning around, let the older man lift up his t-shirt. The Detective had never seen Hanna's bare chest or back before and the epiphany was a sore one: seven more lines of stitches creased his green back over cockeyed gashes, making him look even more torn apart. He swallowed, then looked down, where a faint light was coming from a squiggly symbol on Hanna's starved-looking lower back. A rune.

"There's a mark," he said confusedly. His leather-gloved fingers stopped before touching it. "It's … glowing."

"Really? What does it, like... look like?"

"It's a circle with a few diagonal lines. Then a sort of ... hook and a dot off to the side," the Detective said awkwardly, obviously plumbing the depths of his visual skills. It was hard enough describing the rune without the crisp black dashes of twine cutting right through the middle of it. Hanna asked him a few clarifying questions, then yanked his shirt down and turned around before the older man could even consider asking about the awful gashes.

"That's a homing rune! Like an alarm system, for magic! And I totally remember where I felt it before," Hanna exclaimed triumphantly, closing one eye and pinning his partner's nose on the end of his finger. "I used it to find you. I like, followed the tingles and found you in the alley."

"Is that why you asked me if I used magic, after you woke up?"

"Probably." Hanna shrugged at his partner's dubious look. "I don't remember much about before I passed out or right after. All I know was that someone was casting in that alley, and it probably wasn't those guys who were beating you up."

The Detective frowned at the zombie, trying to remember the night they met. The details were, unfortunately, incredibly foggy. He had been very, very drunk. More drunk than he had ever been, really, a statement reflected more by his gut feelings than his limited year of conscious life, which was made even more strange by the fact he couldn't remember why he had been drinking so heavily . He had had a conversation with an attractive woman, finished his drink, gone outside and promptly gotten slammed into a wall.

He had still doubted the existence of leprechauns at that point in his life, so he hadn't been looking for anything supernatural, but all in all it had seemed like a fairly ordinary mugging with the proper amount of fighting back and ripped pockets. Very physical with relatively unfair odds. Where had the magic come in?

"Man, that is a weird place for a rune! Did I do that in the mirror or something? With a two-foot marker?"

Derailed, the Detective looked down at his partner, who was trying to lift his shirt and look over his shoulder at the same time with a perplexed expression.

"It's too high," he said, shaking his head. "Somebody must have drawn it on for you."

Hanna stopped turning like a harried pomeranian and blinked, then let his shirt fall. His arms slapped to his side, mouth puckering.

"Weird. I guess I have a friend somewhere. Or had." The zombie shrugged after a long pause, then grabbed the Detective's hand and yanked him towards the mouth of a nearby alley before the moment could settle and weigh them down. "Now come on, let's go!"

"Wait, what's happening?" the Detective asked blankly, stumbling a little. Shooting from zero to sixty, the zombie was physically pulling him over the chilly concrete, skinny legs motoring half as fast as his long ones and yet the older man still had to work to keep up.

"If the homing rune is tingling, it means there's magic around!" Hanna told him excitedly over his shoulder as they jointly barreled around a corner, going deeper into the back-alley labyrinth of the city. The very buildings seemed to cave in around them, broken bricks sticking out like the walls were unraveling at their seams. "I think someone's casting, maybe it's even the kid with the pointy teeth? I didn't really get to say thank you for bringing me back and stuff even though he charged us out the wazoo for it – whatever the heck a wazoo is, but if it's him I want to ask him how the whole pelt thing works for half-selkies and if not it'll be a surprise, so let's go!"

The Detective was about to point out the questionable logic in blindly searching out and sneaking up on _anybody_ who was capable of magic when Hanna abruptly ducked down and clung close to a brick wall, putting a finger to his lips conspiratorially. He had the good sense to wrangle a sharpie out of his pocket and doodle something on his palm, which flared a noxious yellow, so his partner didn't say anything further. It wouldn't have mattered anyways: the zombie was already slinking down the narrow alley with a look of utter, almost breathtaking determination on his face.

Hanna's partner had just enough time to hope that this wasn't the way most of their future movie nights would go when something scraped with chilling clarity further down in the sooty darkness. Not even flinching, Hanna snuck in deeper, heel-to-toeing in his ratty shoes, but every step made the hair on the Detective's neck stand up. They got close enough to see two figures standing around the back of a building, one thick and one thin, before Hanna overdid a cautious step and abruptly went flopping into a pile of cardboard boxes.

Chaos exploded in an area eight feet by four feet, all the more terrifying for the pressing brick walls.

Before anyone could so much as say 'stand-off', two thick, long guns were pointed in their faces and Hanna's fist was glowing fiercely and someone was shouting loudly and sharply. Then, suddenly, the alley went silent again. The black gun muzzles hovered inches from both his and Hanna's noses for a few tense moments, making the Detective's hands quiver where he'd thrust them up in the air. The tight alleyway was peppered with nothing but hissing, controlled breathing and the unheard squeak of grinding teeth.

Then, of all things, one of the shadowed men on the other side of the weapons let out a harsh burst of laughter — and, more importantly, lowered his gun.

"Holy shit! It's you!"

Stepping into the scant light of a yellowed security bulb, the tall young man flipped up a pair of terrifyingly blank goggles, revealing one brown eye and one completely white orb peering palely out of a narrow face. His skin was nut-brown in the dark, features vaguely Italian and undeniably handsome. A strange swath of orange cut through the top of his hair, split with brown accents.

"Finas, it's the kid!"

He slapped the shoulder of the shorter, broader man next to him and pointed, face lighting up then going a strange mixture of challenging, fond, appraising and amused as he put a hand on his severely well-equipped hip. His nose was crooked as if it had been broken more than a few times, lending him a roguish appearance that his smirk-prone mouth cemented in full.

"Hanna Falkin' Cross. Christ. We thought you'd been eaten alive."

Hanna blinked something fierce, then instantly slouched down to a ball of nothing; the light on his hand petered out as if it were as embarrassed as he was.

"Er, well, it happens. To some. Very sad people," Hanna said wanderingly, then winced, trying not to let on that he obviously didn't know these people but they obviously knew him and obviously had guns.

He didn't like guns. Especially shotguns. As a zombie, and probably even as a human, they made him very nervous.

The tall man seemed entirely too tickled by his bumbling response and chuckled, nudging the one named Finas again, who only grunted. Finas seemed much older, with a fastidiously trimmed beard that contrasted oddly with the other hunter's tiny, arrogant goatee. He was dressed in a long, concealing leather jacket with gun-straps riding his broad shoulders. Both were armed to the teeth.

"Christ, I love that little fuck-up," he said to Finas but mostly the whole alley, sharp nose wrinkled in amusement.

Finas gave the pair of them a dark, tolerating look and began to perform some kind of maintenance on his gun, unloading the chamber with a jerk of his thick wrists and a terrifyingly sharp clack. His partner propped his own massive gun to the side and slapped himself on the crown of the head, expression saying he just couldn't fucking _believe_ it.

"What are you up to, man? It's been ages since we knocked muzzles."

"Uh. Me? Uh. _Stuff_," Hanna said, voice tiny, big blue eyes pinned on said muzzle.

"Stuff? Hah, I know you. That means you broke into something you weren't sup — god." The younger hunter's face suddenly dropped, one brow inching up. "Woah. You're pale."

The Detective stiffened. The uneasiness that had been seeping out of his stapled chest intensified into a scummy flow. Hanna, blue eyes flashing wide, seemed to catch the exact same chilly notion: these two were obviously in their sphere of work, if they knew Hanna and were sporting so much equipment, but maybe those guns would disagree with Hanna's own changed skin-tone. This wasn't the safest position to be in if they were set on playing it safe.

"Urrrr. Yeah. Haven't been … seeing much daylight recently. Sorta comes with the territory. You know," he said weakly, rubbing at the stitches cross-crossing his arm. He shrunk away from the men as much as possible, trying to hide his skin in the shadows of the alley. Realizing he needed to get out from under the tall one's milky eye, Hanna pointed at the pair of hunters, wincing. "So, uh, what's been up with you? Lots of, uh … er … things? To do? At night? Like … casting spells? And shooting stuff? What do you guys, er, do again? I — the guns are a definite hint but like, what do you do with them?"

But the younger hunter wasn't listening to him. He was stepping closer, herding Hanna closer to the mouth of the alleyway and into a bar of moonlight. He was staring in growing confusion at the nebulous blue light coming from the young man's eyes.

"Forget pale, you look almost dead, Cross. You seriously alright? And — god, did you get in a fistfight with a naga or something, all those stitches, and —"

He fell silent mid-step, then the man's eyes widened and his white eye flashed.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered and suddenly the barrel of the shotgun was shoved in Hanna's face again, making the boy howl _woaaaaah_. Skin tightening viciously, the Detective yanked Hanna back and stepped in front of the small zombie, arms out wide, heart bashing his spine flat.

"No. No. He's—_no_," he half-shouted. He stuck on that one hard, short word, somehow trying to force it down the fathomless black barrel of the gun inches from his chest. He looked up at the man, eyes fierce. "He's alright."

"He's a fucking zombie, who're you to tell me he's alright?" the hunter snapped, raising the gun up to his exposed throat. Then, as he stared the Detective down, his white eye lit up again. The older man could see his suspicion doubling as he took a sharp step back, tightening into a defensive crouch with a scrape of his steel-toed boot. "Who the fuck are you? Did you raise him?"

"I'm Raney. Hanna's assistant," he explained, managing to get his hand between his throat and the gun. It hovered in front of the metal muzzle, delicate and fleshy and shaking. He took a deep breath before the hunter could speak again and decide to kill them both just to be thorough, thinking _of course_ they would run into stuff like this because Hanna was just a ticking time bomb of bad luck even on a movie night. He tried again, keeping his voice deep and calm and rational.

"Listen to me. Put the gun down. He's not a threat. He doesn't eat peopl — he doesn't eat _anything_. He's never hurt a fly."

"Alright that's a little harsh, that's mostly because I can't catch them —" Hanna began defensively behind him. When the Detective put a hand on his arm and squeezed in a decidedly _shut up or face full of buckshot _way, he winced and squinted at the night sky. "Okay. Okay. Shutting up."

The one called Finas hadn't moved thus far, remaining at the edge of their jittering knot of bent knees and tight chests. His solid, broad-shouldered form seemed anchored to the ground by his weight and coolness, winter blue eyes watchful. After looking the paranormal investigators over, his gaze settled grimly on his partner, who seemed to be having a hard time deciding what to do with an old associate who had lost his pulse. The struggle showed on the young hunter's face until he grunted and grit his teeth, some sort of thorny determination solidifying in his lanky frame.

"He's undead. That word has a real important place in our job description and it's always on the other end of a shotgun," the hunter said stonily, resettling the shotgun so it pointed over the Detective's shoulder, where Hanna's blue eyes glowed nervously.

Hanna gasped and gripped onto the back of the Detective's shirt, ducking close. Apprehension slicing into his chest, the older man almost felt the hunter's hand tighten on the trigger when the statue at his side finally moved, big hand emerging from his leather coat to freeze in the air. It was the gesture of pushing aside the gun, complete with force and command, just several steps removed and locked in place.

"Casimiro, hold. We only hunt those undead that are a danger to others." Finas' pale eyes locked on Hanna. "Cross is not one of them, no matter his state."

His voice was so deep, so _masculine_, that it couldn't be ignored. The hunter named Casimiro looked back, clearly startled, but his thin arms seemed locked at the elbows, barely beginning to shake with the stress put on them by his partner's order and the weight of the gun. A fine layer of sweat gleamed on his dark cheek.

"Casimiro," Finas said sternly. "_The gun_."

Casimiro looked backwards again almost helplessly, then, tamed by the hard, certain look in Finas' eyes, he dropped the shotgun and took a deep breath. Crumpling, he ducked and ran a gloved hand through his strange mop of orange hair, white pluming anxiously from his mouth. At last, he turned back to Hanna with something like pity in his wide mismatched eyes.

"Shit. What happened to you, Cross?"

Cautiously, Hanna started to move out from behind him, but the Detective put an iron hand back and kept him where he was, mostly blocked by his chest. The two men went from wanting to shoot Hanna to wanting to know if he was okay rather too quickly for his liking. Obviously, the younger hunter was unstable. Or at least was too fond of using guns to solve things.

"We don't know," he said shortly. The dark, quietly fierce expression on his face let his displeasure and mistrust be known. He didn't bother to hide it, or elaborate on their situation. "That's what we're trying to find out."

"What, so, he doesn't remember?" Casimiro asked, face almost incredulous.

"Nothing."

"Nothing since…"

"Nothing."

Expression twisting as if the older man's tone had cut him, Casimiro stared back and forth between the two investigators, visibly trying to stitch together the unwieldy pieces of their situation. At last, while avoiding the sight of Hanna's delicately green skin, he finally seemed to _see_ the tall, thin man in the orange button-down glaring at him, free hand curled in a fist at his side. Cas squinted hard, then looked back at Finas before gesturing at the Detective.

"Wait a minute. So … you found him?" he asked. He looked at Hanna as well as he could with the Detective's orange shoulder between them, expression simply curious. He suddenly looked as young and punkish as he had always been, their earlier confrontation almost forgotten. "This is the guy, right?"

Hanna took a moment to realize that Casimiro was talking to _him_, and then only peeked around from behind his partner, making a low _whaaaa?_ noise. Casimiro hurmed and then nodded with conviction, waggling his finger at the older man.

"Yeah. It's been a year, but I've got an eye for faces," he said. The slight, self-effacing quirk of his mouth revealed his habit for eye jokes, then his handsome face went serious again. "That's the guy you were looking for, Hanna, wasn't it? The one who'd been kidnapped?"

The Detective couldn't even begin to stop Hanna from striding out from behind him, because his every limb had gone cold. The small zombie looked up at Casimiro, face both too blank and too full.

"You — did I tell you that?" he managed to ask, gesturing wildly with his hands. "Before I, y'know, died?"

"Yeah. Well, I mean … we didn't know you'd _died_, and I guess you wouldn't remember if your head's been emptied, but you were showing that picture to everyone. Told us to watch out for him and report back to you. You seemed really freaked out about it, too, like you were running short on time."

Hanna looked back at his partner, blue eyes wide. The Detective stared back as the information worked its way through him, leaving knots in every part of him. Hanna's gaze dropped to the sticky alley floor, the hunch of his tiny shoulders looking as overwhelmed and lost as the older man felt.

"I was looking for you before I died?" he exclaimed to the floor, then slapped his forehead. When he spoke again, his voice was nearly a whisper. "That's really weird. And you'd been kidnapped, just like you thought. Okay, you didn't ever say that but you did say that you thought something bad had happened to you, so kidnapping kinda fits the bill, doesn't it? It makes sense?"

"I suppose."

The sound of his own voice almost startled him, low and blank as it was. The Detective didn't even feel the word leave his lips. Instead of the story hitting him and sticking with a pain of recognition or truth, all the older man could feel was the cavernous black that hovered behind him and inside his chest pressing at him. Pushing at his lower back. Drilling at his knees.

The night was once again unbearably large and convoluted, his stapled skin a thin pretense at protection.

"Sounds right enough. Hanna didn't tell us much before he ran off, like usual," Casimiro explained. He was obviously the talker of the two, as Finas settled for corroborating his story with a nod, arms stonily crossed across his wide chest. Casimiro shrugged, scratching at the back of his head. "Sentence fragments, mostly. You were lucky if you caught a verb before he skittered off."

For a moment, the alley was completely silent. Then, snapping out of his rigor mortis, Hanna talked at the young hunter for a little bit longer, trying to tease out more information, but that was all the two had. Not that it wasn't altogether too much to think about already. From the way they were handling their guns and glancing down the alley, they had to get going on their hunt. God save whatever they were after, especially if it wasn't guilty.

The Detective, still reeling, could do little more than stand and watch as Casimiro rummaged around in his pocket, a sharp little grin growing on his face.

"Yeah, we're just running rounds, tailing some fangs. Looking for a she-vamp named Adelaide. Nasty little bitch," he said with relish, waggling an eyebrow as he looked up at the Detective, who simply returned his stare blankly. "I put a shape-lock hex on her last time she tried to rip out my throat, but word says she's been all over town, making a mess of things. You heard anything?"

Straightening, the young hunter passed the zombie a poorly printed version of a wanted poster. Hanna took it with slightly shaking hands, flashing Casimiro another nervous grin when the hunter hefted his gun appreciatively. Both he and the Detective looked down at the blurry photos — then met eyes instantly, faces identically shocked. Before the Detective could open his mouth, Hanna thrust it back into Casimiro's hands, folding the paper over the picture of the sleek purple bat that had last been seen biting holes in Conrad Achenleck's furniture.

"Nope! Uh, haven't seen her, that's a really weird looking purple bat form and I'm sure if we'd seen that really weird looking purple bat in any sort of living room or anything we wouldn't forget it, because its so weird and purple and bat-like and totally unforgettable. Nope."

"Nice to know death hasn't changed you too much, Cross," Casimiro said unsurely, tucking it back in his pocket. Taking a step back to fall even with his silent partner, the cocky young hunter gave them a salute. "Give us a heads up if you see her. You know our drop-box. Or you did."

The pair of investigators nodded, all too glad to be out of the back-alley confrontation with so much information riding on their stiff shoulders, but then Casimiro stopped to cock his shotgun noisily and grinned, flashing blunt white teeth.

"Chock-full of silver bullets. Bitch is goin' down, down, down."

He turned on his heel and the vampire hunters walked off together, their strides as different as day and night. As they watched, Casimiro elbowed Finas in the side, grating voice fading into the night as they rounded the corner.

"Hey, let's stop on Elm for tacos before we splatter some vamp-brains. I hear they've got a nest up in the docks, we could crash it. It'd be a great place to try out those new incense smoke bombs and watch 'em all–"

They were gone. The Detective stared after them with an unpleasant, clammy knot in his throat, unsure how to make it go away. It was like his feet weren't even connected to the concrete anymore, sealed off by a thin layer of oil and grime and water. He felt Hanna sway slightly next to him, headlight eyes fixed forward in the exact same way.

"This business attracts the nicest people," the Detective said at last, voice dull and tired.

"I … think I knew them."

The zombie's partner looked down. Judging by his twisted face, Hanna seemed particularly unnerved by the prospect that he knew them, and that they were apparently on such good terms. Or had been. Hanna gulped and shrugged his skinny shoulders.

"It makes sense for spheres like that to cross. We probably like ran into each other tracking the same stuff, but I don't think I … _hunted_ anything like they did. Just, like, solved stuff. No guns."

The idea of putting bullets in the heads of things on a regular and professional basis obviously frightened Hanna. If those things were attempting to kill him, yes; if they were attempting to kill other people, hell yes. He had subdued an evil djinn with nothing but a hammer and his sharpie, so he was by no means opposed to needed violence. His actions at the housing project even unnerved the Detective a little when he stopped to think about them, but to actively seek out things on the basis of their race alone and exterminate them? The tiny zombie didn't like the idea and it glowed straight through his pale skin, rendering him nauseated and unsure-looking.

"Hey," his partner said, putting his arm around the zombie's shoulder. "I'm sure you're right."

"Are you?" Hanna said, voice tiny. He glanced up at the older man, searching his face for the doubt that he so clearly had. His green fingers plucked at each other miserably. "I could have been anything when I was alive. Like, anything."

"But you were you all the time, Hanna," the Detective reminded him firmly, squeezing his shoulder. "And I don't think you were or are even remotely capable of doing something like that."

Hanna looked towards the mouth of the alleyway for an unfathomably long time, blue eyes flickering and sad and hesitant.

"Thanks, Emanuel," Hanna said so quietly he barely heard it. The zombie's tangle of red hair pressed against his side. "A lot."

Then Hanna's fingers curled into his trenchcoat pocket again, seeking safety for those fragile fragments of himself, as they both soaked in the information that he had been looking for the Detective and ended up dead — then found him on the other side.


	15. Anniversaries

A/N: Cas and Finas! Everyone's favorite PRISON BITCHEEEESSSS. … Being totally depressing and baww.

The dynamic between Cas and Finas is a bit different here/in the last chapter, but mostly because Finas is in a REALLY bad mood right now. I put Cas at, say, 26 and Finas at 33. Their relationship is far more tortured as compared to canon, but this is their darkest of times. They really do have fun together … or at least Cas insists they do, even if Finas grumps quite convincingly.

As in canon, Finas had a wife before he met Cas. They didn't meet in prison, but I don't know whether Cas is joking about that? Heh? I can't imagine anything that would land Finas in prison, he seems so responsible! Sosososo much love to my beta and BFF RaeHimura for her help on this one, she knows hunters best!

(OH GOD THEY'RE COMPETENT SOMEBODY HIDE WORTH)

_Warnings: language, violence, blood, lots of trauma and angst and sadness._ I play these two super platonic, but you wouldn't believe it after reading this? I'm so full of mixed messages, but emotional scenes require hugging and touching. And they live together. And they're horribly codependent and knitted together by a shared tragedy.

HEH. Now all they need is an impala.

* * *

Anniversaries

* * *

"I'm seriously not believing you don't remember that guy. Hanna showed us his picture about fifteen times," Cas exclaimed in exasperation, looking over from his knife and the rhythmic grate of his whetting stone. Finas shrugged beside him on the deflated couch, handsome face noncommittal and grim as he tended to his own knife.

It was an odd show of dispassion for the kid, honestly. Finas liked Cross, too, even if the older man was a bit confounded by his high energy and usually left the two younguns to chatter endlessly about their _adventures_ together while he sulked off to the side. Or that was how it seemed to Cas; to Finas, it was simply prudently getting out of the way of a train-wreck of a conversation that, if he tried to follow along, would probably leave him bleeding from his ears.

"I can barely remember him, even now," Finas admitted after a long pause, interrupting his partner's surly muttering about head injuries and impaired short-term memory. His deep voice was solemn and, although Cas was the only one who could have hoped to pick the nuance up, troubled. Finas shook his head. "I can't remember his face, only his shirt."

"He was kinda pushing 'iconic' a little too hard," Casimiro admitted, thinking back on the black tie and the orange shirt. Mostly the tie. What hunter wore something around their neck that was basically a silk noose? Someone with a serious death wish, that's who.

It was almost like the guy was subconsciously wearing something memorable because he knew he was forgettable … or because he was a hunter (or at least a supernatural interloper) and he wanted people looking at his clothes and not his face, so he could dodge any police line-ups. That was the inspiration behind half of Casimiro's flashy hunting clothing, or so he told Finas. Mostly, that red leather jacket just had to be bought, and he did his best work when he looked good.

The young hunter sat back, propping his scarred brown hands and their pointy contents on his crossed leg. Maybe there was something odd about Hanna's new partner, even past the whole 'Hanna-has-a-partner' thing, which sat uncomfortably beside the 'Hanna-is-dead' thing, which Casimiro absolutely wasn't addressing at the moment. He could feel his memory of the man sort of looking for an exit in his head — scrounging around for a crack to slip through — but still, he remembered him. Then again, Cas saw a lot of things with his eye that normal people didn't. He was used to saying _holy shit did you see that_ and having Finas shrug. Then again, considering what was hiding in people's peripheries all the time, maybe it was better that most were blind to it. Better to spend your life unknowingly living in danger than ducking around every corner.

Cas looked over at his partner, studying his moody profile for as long as he dared before he put down his knife and his whetting stone and exhaled slowly.

"You alright, Eeyore?"

He had tried everything over the past two nights. Finas' favorite food, his favorite music, jokes he hated but would smile at _because_ he hated them. After leaving Hanna the previous night, they had scrounged around on the docks and turned up empty-handed, retreating to their apartment to sleep the brightness away behind their black-out curtains and fresh salt lines. That evening, they had saddled up again and managed to stake one. It was their first hit in two weeks. Bursting with victory and relief, Cas had jabbed at Finas again and again, sticking his elbows into his partner's stocky side in a way that usually never failed to get him to smile. But each time, Finas just looked out the car window or made a dull affirmative noise.

Punishing him.

"Lighten up, man. One of our pals just got killed and magicked into an undead pile of bones, that's nothing to drag face about. In our line of work, that's practically mundane."

Despite his almost desperately sardonic tone, there was no answer. Finas kept his eyes on his gun, which he was cleaning for the second time that night. It was only eleven. Cas deflated permanently, or so it seemed: the dejected feeling that rolled through him at the sight of his partner like this seemed to last for days. With far more effort than it should have taken, Cas palmed his hair out of his eyes.

"You're gettin' serious on me again, Fin," he muttered into his lap.

"Our mission has never been anything but serious, no matter how you insist on treating it like a joyride."

"Finny … seriously?"

Cas sounded genuinely tired: a rarity. Finas only used the word _mission_ when he was feeling particularly grim and burgeoning with sour zealotry. Finas turned and gave his younger partner a withering glance.

"And what would you call it?"

Casimiro knew he was in dangerous territory by the soft, challenging timber of Finas' voice, but couldn't stop himself from slapping his hands down on his knees and gesturing at the air in frustration.

"I don't know, man. A _business_?" he offered, falling back onto the couch resentfully when Finas snorted and looked away from him. He locked up and got a little defensive at that, but still tried not to whine and thus piss Finas off even further. "It has its fun parts! 'Mission' makes it seem like we're doomed to do this or something."

The sharp, morbid clack of Finas emptying his gun chamber said he didn't at all disagree with that definition. Anger flaring sullenly, Casimiro glared over at their overflowing gun-case, knowing he had to redirect and deflect or else he would say something he'd regret. Then he realized he really, really needed to say something, regardless of whether it was a smart move.

Casimiro turned around and fixed his partner and best friend with a scathing glare of his own, lip curling with the thorny, built-up aggression of several slow, difficult, silent nights and dead-end hunts.

"Look, what the hell crawled up your ass and died? You've been like this for a week, now. No one ever called you the life of the party, but either tell me what's up with you or quit glaring holes in the back of my head like I pissed you off."

Finas didn't flinch. Then again, Finas never flinched at anything. Ever.

His thick frame was totally unsuited for such a small, quick and useless motion. The older man looked to the side of their weapon-cluttered living room, painted the noncommittal shade of cream every cheap east-side apartment claimed. The pair didn't bother to paint it, not because they had no grand artistic vision, but because they knew they could be gone again the next day. That life-fact of hunting made for sparse living and a preference for bland shades of paint.

Finas waited for a moment, feeling the heft and weight of the gun in his hands and the blankness of the walls, then spoke.

"I would expect you to get so wrapped up in the joy of hunting vampires that you would forget the date."

"The date?"

It was a foreign subject and a number-language he didn't speak. Casimiro went by Mondays-Wednesdays-Fridays, or seasons, at a stretch. It was cold, so it was a Tuesday in winter and that was honestly the extent of the younger hunter's knowledge. Then he remembered a Wednesday in winter approximately four seasons ago and his tough, stringy heart touched the back of his throat.

As if the last grisly strand of the rope holding him had been snapped, he slumped forward, fingers digging into his knees.

"Oh. Christ."

Finas's blue eyes pinned him into the couch, but only for a second. They flickered away, settling back on his gun — and thank god, because that gaze pretty much voided all the breath in Casimiro's body, turning him into a creaking husk. The young hunter sat and felt the void opening around him, given shape and depth by a simple numbering system. When he couldn't stand it anymore, he gave a harrowed smirk and looked over at Finas.

"So what, you're upset because I didn't get you a death-day present? I'd say if you're around for the anniversary of your own death, you're pretty much a certified bad-ass."

"Casimiro," Finas hissed dangerously, pure anger daggering from his blue eyes and the manic clench of his big hands on his gun.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, _fuck,_" Cas grit out hastily, _miserably_, closing his eyes and putting his hands up. God, he was seriously out of control if he could say shit like that, but it seemed like the only thing that would come out of his mouth. Especially when facing such a void.

What _could_ anyone say that would make sense of it? Especially when being serious wasn't going to change a damn thing at the end of the night? He had been allergic to mature conversations before this, but now his defense mechanisms were just kicking him in the ankles. Shit.

"This was not part of the plan," Finas said to his left after a long, long pause, voice unspeakably dark.

Understatement of the fucking _year_. Cas wanted to say it, wanted to actually yell it as he yanked at Finas' lapels and begged his voice to hit some other timbre than _endlessly grim and judgmental_, but Casimiro restrained himself to pressing his slack face into his hands.

"There was a plan?" Cas asked, voice patchy, then shut up. Knowing he would make another stupid crack again if he kept his mouth open. Make things harder on himself, like he was so talented at doing.

Finas rose from the couch with his gun with a movement that, though unconscious, still held all of his natural power. He walked with awful slowness over to the rack, before putting it in its place of pride, right at the top.

Cas felt him turn around and _not_ look at him.

"You swore we would only use so much magic. Just enough magic that we wouldn't become what we hunted."

"And we did!" Cas shot back, tearing his face from his palms and feeling his defense unraveling even before the true attack began.

"And what of not consorting with those we hunt?" Finas demanded, gesturing sharply to the side.

The older hunter let the accusation hang in the stale air of their apartment before saying what Cas knew he would, even though he'd only said it once, right after it happened. Just remembering it, Cas's throat started to tighten. Finas looked at him, tangled emotions evident in the stiff line of his mouth and the wounded fierceness in his eyes.

"You sold your soul to save me, Casimiro."

"And my eye," Casimiro added after a moment, squinting a little. "Which, y'know, I'm pretty sure I miss more than my soul. Yeah, the cold itchy feeling is pretty bad but this whole depth perception thing is a real bitch, and I —"

"_Casimiro_."

"I love you," Casimiro said, his voice suddenly weak. Weak as his hands, which hovered like they wanted to grab onto Finas' wide, broad, _invincible_ shoulders as he bent forward, pained. His mismatched eyes were locked on his partner, the light in them fearsome and almost worshipful. Panicked.

"I love you, Finas. And not in the gay way, or anything, I just … you know I do. You know you're my best friend, my … god, you're my life. I would have gone insane without you. Then I bugged you until you came with me on that run, I made you come with me, and then that thing … you don't remember. You weren't there. Not like I was."

Cas' voice faltered and broke. Somewhere, he knew he wasn't making much sense. Of course Finas had been there, he had _died_, but while Finas may have remembered a horrible sensation before everything went black, he hadn't _seen it_. He hadn't had those precious few blood-spattered feet between himself and his dead body, or the vertical feet to fall that made the crack of his knees so painful and yet so unimportant.

The young hunter shut his eyes as the memory sliced through him: Finas' powerful hands curled on the floor, slick with red. His empty blue eyes and that horrible gash across his broad chest, red-greased marble of his ribs glinting underneath the gore. The complete lack of movement. The void that had opened in Cas at that moment had no match, even now, after the deal had been struck. Honestly, he had been lucky to escape with his mind intact — or maybe he hadn't.

In fact, he was relatively sure he hadn't. Not after seeing that.

"Would've done anything to save you. Even if it meant I died."

"You are dead," Finas said quietly, tone unreadable.

"No, I'm … pretty alive." Cas managed a faint, damaged smile, patting his chest and looking nauseated. "I'm just not gonna like the place I go when I do die."

It was another one of those things that they never said aloud. They had managed to avoid it for a whole year, burying it and biting it back and hiding in the stealthy silence and canned dialogue that hunts required (the blind enjoyment that Cas pursued so fervently because it did leave him blind), until Cas finally decided he was tired of ducking from it.

But starting it all was really hard when he went past the obvious facts, because Cas realized he just didn't know what he should say. Was he trying to make it better, justify it or make excuses? In the void, all the things he _wanted_ to say (had wanted to say ever since that night a year ago) took over his soupy gut, pushing aside his common sense. His voice took on that whining quality that he knew Finas detested, but he couldn't stop himself.

"I just did the first thing I thought of," he pleaded, like he was bleeding an infected cut.

"Summoned a demon."

Finas' voice was twice as cold as his blue eyes.

"The words just came into my head. I swear I'd only looked in that spell-book once, and it just … it was insane, man. Insane. I was desperate and I think that thing … heard me."

Cas looked down, shivering from just saying it. The very thought made his teeth ache, his head throb. He caught himself wondering how many uncomfortable truths could be packed into one night and realized they would probably hit their quota and surpass it. The entire thing was just too fucked up.

Threadbare and glinting with black metal and powder, their living room remained a haunting still life of two men and one life. They only had one between them anymore, so they had to share it, and the cracks were beginning to show. Pressing around them was the same cold silence that began one awful night seven years ago — the one that screamed that Finas wasn't facing what was happening, not really.

If Cas wanted anything out of what remained of his life, it was to never hear that awful ringing nothingness again.

* * *

_He had come to help the family, in so much as he always helped families in houses where vamps struck._

_It was his job, and he had been doing it since he was legal to drive. Other nineteen-year-olds worked at convenience stores and attended community college: Casimiro collected guns, brought a whole new meaning to the term 'stake-out' on a nightly basis and came home to his shitty apartment covered in cold blood. Family was complicated and also very much dead. Vamps. With that gone, he turned to what he knew he could do, and he did it well. He had only gotten arrested three times and counted each of those with a dash of pride and at least one scar per incarceration. He never had known when to shut up and crusty inmates didn't take kindly to that, but he preferred to think that his usual relocation to solitary had more to do with protecting the assholes from _him.

_One run-of-the-mill night in summer, Casimiro had tracked a vamp and his fledgling all the way to the grand-looking house on Porter, and knew he hadn't been detected because the door was wide open and had stopped creaking long ago. The sticky night seemed to pour into the house, slow and dark as molasses, and deepen both its shadows and the held breath of the wooden staircase. Looking around the manicured neighborhood carefully and snapping his goggles down, Cas crept past the white porch railing and through the front door. Vamps couldn't enter unless invited, but they had nasty ways of getting around that when hunting white meat in suburbia: they posed as mechanics or inspectors of some sort, putting up the act just long enough to get an offhanded wave into the human's home. After that, the contents of the house were practically canned food._

_Cas knew that a group of vamps had been making tours around that part of town; he just wasn't expecting a hit for another day or two. They had surprised him. He didn't like being surprised any more than any other egotistical nineteen-year-old did._

_He found the nastiest of surprises in the upper bedroom of the trim white house, splattered between the pastel flowers on the wall._

_From the way the pretty blond woman was sprawled beside her child's white gingerbread bed, the fangs had caught them when she was checking up on her; the cough syrup on the bedside table finished the story. The vermin made a packaged meal of the two for him and his fledgling. Left sticky puddles of blood under them that shone red-black in the bars of moonlight from the picture window._

_Cas cursed softly as the scent of congealing blood swamped his nose and throat, making that ugly ache build quickly in his chest. He never let it peak (he usually killed something before that happened and bled himself of a little of the pain), but the feeling wasn't even close to unbearable when the bedroom door opened behind him. The hunter whirled, spooked, but where he expected to find a black-clothed monster there only stood a stocky man, sleepy-eyed and shirtless, pushing tentatively at the door._

_Pale light shone in from the hall, haloing his shaggy brown hair. The man's halved silhouette stood as an icon for fathers with sick children everywhere__._

"_Millie? Is she alright?"_

_Feeling suddenly trapped in the small, pink bedroom – the stifling, still grave – Cas put his gloved hands up, backing into the wall. Almost knocking over a stand-up dollhouse, he put as much distance as he could between himself and the woman's pale body, which was twisted like a lotus leaf on the downy pink carpet. But the man wasn't even looking at him._

_He was looking at his wife, dead on the floor, two red holes in her neck. All the sleep disappeared from his eyes, voiding the blue irises like water and leaving them winter-sky hollow._

_There was blood in the carpet and the air. The little pink room, once so safe, smelled like death and that smell settled on the soft cooling bodies of a wife and a daughter. One leg jerked forward, then the other, and Casimiro, who had never been fucking caught like this before, tried to disappear into the wall as the muscled man crumpled to his knees. Breathing in sharply, he bundled the woman's lifeless body into his arms, thick fingers pushing through her lank blond hair and the blood sliming it to her head. He pushed and pushed and held her, and finally when her head rolled heavily onto his shoulder, limp on the punctured white stalk of her neck, he started to shake._

_He screamed his wife's name, raw and loud, and that was all Casimiro heard in the way of grief from the man he would come to know as Finas._

_He didn't even say his daughter's name. It was like he couldn't even look at her, arranged like a rumpled doll on the red-stained comforter, all ruddy fever-bloom drained to a stark white. Cas detected that trembling barrier right off, so heavy and destructive it was almost palpable, and knew it wasn't _right_ in so far as shattering grief could ever be right. _

_Then again, Cas was usually long gone before the grieving process began, so it was all he could do to look away from the man's haunted expression and trembling hands and cock his shotgun._

"_Don't worry. I'll fucking splatter the thing that killed her," he said roughly, saying _it wasn't him who did it_ even as he knew how poor of a consolation it was. It was just something he said: it was the one thing he could do to stop more shit like this from happening, to lessen fangs' bloody mark on the world, because he knew from personal experience he couldn't bring loved-ones back to life. It was just fact._

_Cas started to stalk past him, like he always did, except the man staggered to his feet as he passed, and his hard hand clapped on his shoulder and stopped him without even trying. _

"_Help you," he rasped. His hand didn't even shake and that alone had Casimiro staring like he'd seen another monster._

"_What? No," he said confusedly, because people didn't offer that, which is what it seemed like the man was doing. _

_It wasn't right. Your family went down and you survived, then you went down anyways on your knees and cried or tried to kill yourself. You didn't ask for a gun like it was the sanest and most efficient option._

_The man stared at him, something unnamable shifting in his face (the same thing that let him cope so viciously with the strange man in his house and the fact there were things in the night that stole people's lives, or perhaps that was just the weight of his wife in his arms), then his lip curled a fraction and he reached for the bristling belt around Casimiro's waist. His naked arms bulged, huge and cruel. Casimiro tried to dance back the second he realized what was going on, skin suddenly chilly underneath his underarmor._

"_No, no, you can't just … you can't fuckin' do that!"_

_It came bursting out of him, but the older man's face was unfathomably cold as he ripped the gun out of his belt-strap like people weren't supposed to be able to do and cocked it like a professional. _

"_Where do I shoot?" he demanded in a way that wasn't demanding at all, but a monotone that nonetheless made Cas's chest lock up._

"_The head. You shoot the head, then you stake the heart," the hunter recited numbly, because there was nothing else to do now that the man had his gun. He was utterly silenced by the demonic fierceness in his ice-blue eyes, the silent hatred and insanity. Cas unconsciously reached for him with a faint exclamation as the man stalked away; the muscles worked hard in his back, shifting and bunching up so he looked like a white-skinned monster himself._

_The man managed to put a bullet through the sire's temple before Cas got there, adding a new blood-spatter to the walls of his bedroom, where the pair had been coming for him._

_The fledgling was helpless without her sire. She went down easy. All it took was a stake for each of them and they dusted, leaving a sickeningly oily coating of grey that settled onto the carpet. Finas watched it sink into his floor with a ragged tension in his heavy arms and the beastly line of his back that left the young hunter the most unsettled he'd ever been when facing down two exterminated vamps — and even as Cas left him there in his empty bedroom, he knew it was only a matter of time before he saw him again._

_Only a week later, he had tracked Casimiro down and was in his fucking living room, waiting for him._

It wasn't as if the young hunter had an exceptional home security system — it was just a shitty apartment and the door itself would give way before the cheap lock ever did — because he hardly had to worry about vamps wandering in uninvited. Their little 'hospitality' law would stop them before the locks ever became an issue. This was before he expanded his hunting reportoire with Finas' help and he had to worry about things like salting windows. Still, the fact that his door was hanging splintered from its hinges didn't really do much for him in the 'I like this guy' department.

_To his credit, Casimiro had his own way of sending signals: he just sat down on his ratty couch and started cleaning his knife until the guy talked._

"_I want to help you," the man said, just like the night in the house._

_He stood looking out of Casimiro's scummy living room window with his big hands clasped urbanely behind his back. He was wearing a simple button-down and slacks that nonetheless appeared indescribably sloppy and disordered in a way that went down to the very threads of it all. It was like his hands had been shaking compulsively on every single button, or maybe his skin was in pieces beneath it. Cas didn't like it. At all. _

_He wasn't even okay with the concept of partners, even if he was sort of okay with the way the man had handled himself — the skill part, not the cavernous emotions part that helped him do it. Cas looked up at the man like he was waiting for a crack to open up beneath his skin, to splinter his heavy jaw and grey-ringed eyes. He stunk of repressed stress. Instability._

_His wife had died seven days ago, as had his little girl. Not the sanest of times to be making life-decisions like becoming a vampire hunter and living on the fringes of society._

"_Sit down, you're scaring the hell out of me," Casimiro muttered at length, motioning to the couch. Which was true. So fucking true, and Cas wasn't scared of many things. _

_The man left his window and sat down beside him. Looking at his slightly-askew possessions later, Cas realized that Finas had been inspecting his gear before he got there. Touching it and weighing it against the hole in his chest.__He knew later, his future best friend was already absorbing the life of a vampire hunter, seeing if it was something he was physically capable of. Already psyching himself into the job that would let him not think about his gouged-out life even as he ghost-battled it every day. _

_No one ever said Finas was slow on __the__ uptake. It's just when it got to that psychotic level of readiness that Cas learned to be worried._

"_I won't get in your way. I only ask for enough training to not interfere with whatever system you have worked out. You will not be responsible for my life. I will figure out the rest."_

_Christ, how could he technically ask something and have it come out like he was telling the hunter how it would be, no exception? He would say it didn't work like that, but it would be useless. Casimiro shrugged sullenly, just settling for the facts._

"_It's a full-time job, man. Weird hours, weird injuries. Nightly chance of arrest. Not something you can do and keep up rent on big houses."_

"_I don't want that house anymore," he said softly, and Cas could feel the distance in his deep voice. It was that distance that drew him inevitably closer to the older man, made him believe that he needed something violent and strange and otherworldly to string his life up by, just to cope. Just like him._

_At that moment, he was just unspeakably uncomfortable with the big man beside him. Regretting inviting him onto his precious couch, Casimiro made a vague sound and reached for a block of wood and, after absently flipping the knife in his hand, dug into it. Guided by years of experience, he shaped the stake skillfully and quickly, brown eyes dull as his visitor watched him. Wood shards littered the cushion in moments._

"_How do you do it?" the man asked, and Cas didn't know whether he was talking about the stake-carving thing or __the__ making-rent thing or the seeing-people's-families-torn-apart-by-fucking-monsters-on-a-nightly-basis thing. _

_From the intensity of his eyes, probably the last one, but even Cas couldn't put it down to a science: it was one of those things that, if he spoke it aloud, he might lose track of it or catch a stray thread and it would all collapse as he walked further along. It was something that occurred beneath the skin, quiet as photosynthesis and twice as vital to surviving. Something you had to do in the dark of your eyelids._

_He swallowed and settled for the safest option. Paycheck._

"_People hire me to hunt stuff. Once you get hooked into the supernatural network, there are tons of people out there who need bogies exterminated. I'm the only one around here that's got the equipment and know-how to do it: usually they just point and scream, leave it to me to identify it and shoot it, and pay afterwards."_

"_So you're a... supernatural hit-man."_

"_Guess you could say that," Cas admitted, shaving off a huge curl of wood with a jerk of his wrist and whittling the point to a nasty dagger of a splinter. He looked up and shook the knife. "But mostly vamps. If it has fangs, I kill it. No exceptions."_

The awful eagerness in Finas' eyes was only outshone by the vapid winter-blue sea of unfeeling, which plainly scared the shit out of Casimiro, but they were still partners by nightfall.

* * *

It took every ounce of strength in Cas to break that awful stalwart silence — and then even more to say what he'd been holding back for a year.

"Listen. I'm not one to bitch about treating gifts with the proper respect. I know you didn't want to come back. I know I dragged you out kicking and screaming. I know about …"

Cas ducked his head. If he believed in that afterlife stuff, Finas would have been with his wife and child. Since Finas wouldn't talk about it, his best friend was forced to believe he had ripped him from their angel arms. Taken away the thing he wanted most in the world, even including life itself.

The fact he never would have found Finas without their bloodless, fang-marked bodies bundled in that bedroom was, and had always been, a particular pain for Cas. No one with a soul could feel grateful about those morbid circumstances and yet, sometimes, on dark days, he still fucking managed it. Now, by simple courtesy of the hole in his chest, he was free to feel it all the time.

"Yeah, you got the rest of your natural life to think about what you're missing out on — and hey, you can even cut it short if you want to. We've got all the necessary equipment. Sixty cents and some gunpowder and you can go back to Millie tonight."

Cas used the name and winced on the inside, stomach giving a horrified convulsion. It wasn't even the heartless taunt that did it. Was it sick that he had never learned Finas' daughter's name? Or was it sicker that Finas had never told him?

"But I got six years and three hours left. Six years flat at midnight, and then eternity. All I'm gonna ask is that you smile once in a while and give me a life worth living. Give me a scrap book I can be proud of when I go below." Cas looked down at his knees, then up at his best friend, face unreadable. "Let 'em know it was worth it."

There was a reason he didn't think in dates and numbers. Otherwise, his life – or what was left of it – was nothing but a massive count down.

He sat motionlessly, isolated and chilled by the gravity of his situation for the first time since he made the deal. His deal with the devil. It had just taken him a year to swallow it. But the seismic heave of his regret and fear and utter sureness had reached across the cold air between the two men, drawing Finas toward him with rushed footsteps.

The couch creaked; Cas looked over to find Finas looking at him with those blue eyes half full, face tense with emotion. The older hunter reached over and slid a big hand around his thin arm, and that buried emotion blasted Cas in half, making him shake.

"Cas."

The warm, hoarse name made him clench his eyes shut; the tears that crept down his nose were completely out of his control. He realized, maybe, that he thought he was being brave when really he was being stupid. Finas made a low noise that was angry and mournful and hopeless and determined at the same time, full of surrender and ragged fight and all the more true for its paradoxes.

He gripped Cas' other arm and pulled him closer, breathing through his teeth and matching each of his partner's caving, miserable breaths as Cas cried for the first time since he had sold his soul and even further back. Through the haze of his tears, Cas could feel the anger coming out of his best friend's strong frame, but also a sorrow too deep to put into words.

The fact that this irresponsible young man — _his_ irresponsible young man, his loud, irreverent and invincible Casimiro – had done something so crushing and so serious for him hurt Finas. It broke the fiber of Cas' spirit for him, because of him. He, Finas, wasn't worth it. Nothing was worth that.

He was supposed to be protecting Casimiro, but when he had died doing it, Cas gave up everything for him.

"I'm sorry," Finas whispered at last, voice rough and mangled by the horror pushing at the back of his throat.

Sorry for dying, sorry Cas couldn't live without him, sorry for ruining what time he had left with his own anger and regrets.

"Me too, man." Cas smiled, a dented and wounded thing full of buried vitriol and helplessness. That was the last straw for his partner. Finas reached forward and yanked Casimiro to his sturdy _cavernous_ chest, which still wasn't filled no matter the cost the boy had paid. "Me, too."

His big fingers pushed through Cas's soft hair as the young man leaned against his shaking chest, wetness coating Finas' cheeks soundlessly. The sobs stayed buried in his chest, shaking his heart in staccato and keeping him alive as the black night passed them by, reducing Casimiro to smoke hour by hour. He gripped onto the texture and weight and warmth of his partner, the bawling impetuous young man who had brought him to his wife's deathbed and yet become his best friend, until Cas sniffed noisily and drew back. Finas' big hand grabbed his cheek, stopping them forehead to forehead.

Casimiro still felt warm. He didn't feel dead, but the milky sheen of his left eye marked him as half gone. Half what they hunted, and more dangerous than ever before in the face of temptation now that he had nothing to lose.

"I should kill you," Finas said sadly. His gloved thumb ran over Cas's jaw, testing his dark, rich skin as if waiting to see it peel away, replaced by an undead white.

"I know," Cas murmured, and wrapped his arms around his best friend and stayed there on his broad shoulder like a child, their knees gently entangled, until it struck midnight.


	16. Squeaky Clean

A/N: Who says it's time for a little pointless smut after that soul-razing of a FinasCas chapter? Cacodemonia. This chapter is all hers, in return for being an amazing and kind artist, so go leave cyberflowers on her internet doorstep!

Just to complete the shout-out, I suppose, I totally stole the bath idea from Spookmouse. I am so lame ;_; I SWEAR I RESPECT YOU, LADY, AND AM NOT JUST OUT TO STEAL YOUR STUFF. (Also, if you're reading this and you don't know about them? SHAME ON YOU GO READ/SEE, best ho-mance in the history of internets.)

_Warnings: language, intense sexual content (on y!gal)_

* * *

Squeaky Clean

* * *

Wednesday night of another workweek found Conrad lying bonelessly in his dark bathtub, restless as a caged snake.

He'd spent the last half-hour trying to soak away the cold of the night that sat heavy and black outside his high bathroom window, and thus far had only gained wrinkled fingers for his effort. The only real sound was the gentle sloshing of the water, since his playlist had gone on empty. The lights were off. The fan buzzed nasally above him, making the bathroom seem cavernous and weird.

His apartment just felt empty. He hadn't heard from the Detective in a while and, truth be told, it was making him edgy. And not _just_ because the man usually showed up just in time to inform him of horrible shit that undermined his life-views and killed whatever sense of meager middle-class, gated-community safety he had left. He was beginning to see past that and believe that the man _didn't_ store up ugly epiphanies to slap him with, but that keeping up with him was actually the best way to stay safe. Or informed, at the least.

Mostly, he really, honestly wanted to know how the whole witchdoctor thing had gone with Hanna. Like, really this time. For real, with no alternative motives concerning vampires.

Fuck. Vampires.

Conrad looked at his iPhone, also the source of his playlist, and carefully wiped his hands off before picking it up and flipping to the Detective's number. The man still didn't have a profile in his address book, because putting his title there or, even worse, his fake name would have been like an admission that this was normal and permanent. After staring for a second, he gingerly put it back in its holster, exhaling thickly through his nose, annoyed at himself. It was probably too late. He was probably asleep already.

Then his mouth twitched. Who was he kidding? In this spooky social sphere, four a.m. was barely pushing business hours.

Still, there was the chance that the Detective wouldn't _want_ to be called by someone at this hour (even if Conrad was a friend and the man had said so himself and that still meant an awful lot to Conrad even though he didn't know if it merited four a.m. conversations that started with 'So, what are you doooooo-ing?' where you could almost hear him twirling his hair). Deprived of an immediate update or distraction, Conrad sat back in his wide white bathtub and tried to think about other things, but he couldn't quite stay on one thought-train that didn't involve work or spooky shit.

After a few minutes of staring unhappily at the wall, he gave up and did what every man does when he's frustrated and there's nothing else to do … except that he wasn't an average man and generally didn't make a habit of excessive boredom masturbation.

Conrad plainly wasn't very good at it. He'd heard of some people able to play their own strings better than anyone, who _preferred_ masturbation to anything mutual, but he was not among that number. His experience with Joss hadn't exactly been wonderful, but he'd taken away enough data to realize that anyone could do it better than he could, which only made him feel pathetic and even more self-conscious than usual when his hormones wrung the act out of his high-strung body. His hyper-conservative upbringing didn't help the chore, and god forbid he make any noises while doing it.

Still, it seemed like a good enough distraction for the moment, and simultaneously a very bad one. The main reason he didn't want to leave himself to stew and think wasn't because he _couldn't_ think about anything in particular, but because he was really sort of thinking about Luce. A week ago, the coroner had come home the night after their modest drug party and the bed was empty. The balcony doors were closed and there wasn't even a pair of fang-holes in his precious throw pillows to mark the vampire's stay. The only thing he had to remember the night by was his sketch, which he was now surprised that Luce hadn't torn in half or something equally shitty. There was also the faint watermark on his duvet, but still, how could someone be so astoundingly obnoxious and _life-wrecking_ and then just … vacate so completely?

More importantly, when was he going to be back?

Conrad hoped he only imagined the hopeful upswing of that mental question and set to physically distracting himself before he could ask more stupid questions. Stupid questions that he probably … really didn't want to know the answer to. Make that 'definitely'.

He set to work (god, where was his sign-in sheet, the clock to punch), lowering his hand between his cockeyed knees and gripping at himself, closing his eyes. Trying to keep himself blank and just open to feeling, maybe. And definitely not thinking about how fast he could go before the water made annoying, ridiculous splashing noises and god _damn_ it, couldn't he be spared the logistics of this for a single fucking moment? Why did every little thing have to matter so much?

He tried to think about normal sexy stuff or something, but of course Luce was an invasive little shit, even in his head. Frowning deeply, Conrad tried to force his mind elsewhere — the cute man at the coffee shop, a famous movie-star, even the Detective before his conscience fucking slammed the brakes on that because friends did _not_ fantasize about friends — then gave up with a sigh of pent-up air. Maybe because he felt ridiculous with his dick in his hand and his mind in a shock-collar, he just fucking decompressed and _gave up_.

Conrad slid down further into the tub in surrender, shivering as the warm water washed up over his chilly chest, and let himself honestly _think_ about Luce for possibly the first time since their whole affair had begun.

Seeing the vampire naked a week ago had done amazing, horrible things to his imagination, especially since he really hadn't gotten to touch Luce properly – map out that starved expanse with his hands and make it real. Just the thought of Luce kneeling above him made him tense a little. Most of all, Conrad remembered the way he kissed, forceful and with just enough teeth (which for him wasn't very much), sucking at his tongue in a way that pulled on his tingling spine and made him just want to twang like a bow and gasp aloud.

When he did that (just admit it), Conrad just wanted to climb in his fucking lap and grind against his hard front, digging his hands into his skinny sides. Wanted to pant in his ear and push his fingers into his clean, bristly hair. He wished he could remember most of what happened in the alley, even as he couldn't risk pinning those subjective smears of hard sensation and bliss down to porno motions and packaging them into a stale fantasy. His artist's side just couldn't let that happen, and he knew how bad he was at turning himself on.

So he just thought of Luce and rode the feeling of it all. Conrad tugged slowly under the water as he thought of Luce's tongue running over his thin smirking lips, over the tips of his fangs, wiry body pressed against his. Imagined the man — vampire, _say it_ — kissing him fiercely as his hand tangled with the front of his slacks, then shoved inside and pushed at him rhythmically. Conrad's hand did the same, not daring to think of how easy it was once those callused, demanding fingers weren't his anymore.

Then the Luce in his head went down to his knees with a horribly superior, lusty grin and Conrad sped up suddenly, sparks of pleasure making his knees jerk uncertainly. He panted high and light as Luce pressed him back — why was it into a public restroom door? — and slid his briefs down his thighs. Luce's cool tongue did awful things below his beltline, red eyes pinned on him in a way that made him bite his lip and whine very, very softly, so that no one outside would hear. Then the vampire pushed him into his mouth, sucking hard, clawed hands dug into his taut ass.

Warmth knotted in Conrad's gut, making him suck in a breath and go a little faster or _a lot_ faster. The fervent little splashes of water just added to the rising push of his pulse as his head tipped back, flush creeping up his neck.

"Oh god," he whispered, making a throaty, involuntary noise as pleasure flared so intensely his hips twitched. White was encroaching into the tense, vibrating space behind his eyes. He was going to come, fuck it, _fuck it_, he was going to come and it was actually going to feel good —

"Oh _Jesus_."

"Don't ferget the Holy Spirit. He always gets th' shaft."

"Holy fuck, agh, what, agh! _Agh!_"

Conrad spasmed all the way down to his toes, hand flying off of his dick and onto the side of the tub as the water in the bathtub went berserk, sloshing violently up against the sides. He cursed explosively, skin blazing as he scrabbled at the wall, then froze. The water settled unhappily, leaving Conrad a miserable shaking ball of naked, orgasmically interrupted man in his bathtub, skinny legs drawn up close to his chest.

It was a full second before he could legitimately register the vampire sitting two feet away, skinny form sprawled lazily against the side of his bathtub.

"Aw c'mon, I was enjoyin' that."

Luce emerged from his fluffy coat cuff with a smug look, fangs peeking playfully past his lip. He cocked his head, red eyes greasing Conrad up.

"N' from the look ovvit, I wadn't alone."

"Jesus Chr — do you ever _not_ break in?" Conrad blurted out incredulously, voice cracking something fierce. He wasn't really noticing or caring that he wasn't making sense because god damnit he'd just gotten caught with his dick in his hand by the very man he was imagining _on_ his dick. What the _fuck_.

"Eh, habit." Luce shrugged, then propped an elbow up on the side of his tub as Conrad, panting himself into a stupor, tried to appropriate all the blood from his lower half so he could think properly. The vampire played with a bottle of body wash, rocking it back and forth with an expectant look. He knocked it over (Conrad flinched) and asked, "You seen the zombie?"

"Are you really fucking asking me that?" Conrad demanded after a long moment, hoarse and flat.

Luce's expression said he very much was and also didn't see the problem in being prompt and not dancing around the subject like a pansy faggot. Pent-up tenseness boiling over, Conrad made an inexpressible sound of rage and frustration and crippling embarrassment and threw a handful of water at him, following it with three shampoo bottles and a loofa and a few _you stupid vampiric fucker_s. Luce ducked away from the tub, snarling at him impatiently and dodging his poor throws.

After all the bottles within arms' reach were gone, they stared each other down across the edge of the tub, Conrad breathing heavily and Luce not breathing at all. Then Conrad found he just didn't _care_ anymore, and he'd lost it anyways. He abruptly sagged down over his knees, one wet hand scrubbing over his face.

Fuck his _life_.

"They … god. I gave them the witch-doctor's contact info right after I got it. A little over a week ago. Haven't heard back from them." Dodging the utter aneurysm of using the words 'witchdoctor' and 'contact info' in the same sentence, Conrad realized he honestly didn't know whether the Detective would call him with good news, or if he would only deem bad news worthy of a call. He shrugged. "It's anybody's guess at this point."

"You got his number?" Luce asked, gesturing at his iPhone. Conrad's mouth fell open.

"What do — we aren't in fucking middle-school! I am not going to call him for you!"

Especially right after _that_, Conrad finished with an accusatory glare. Because otherwise, really, it was a fair guess whether he would have done it and he didn't like to think about Luce having that much sway over him, even if he would have mentally disguised it as an attempt to get the vampire out of his hair. Luce glared at the black-cased 'iDoodad' resentfully, then snorted and went back to leaning indolently on the side of the tub, lolling in the mostly-clean puffs of fur at his wrists. His red eyes gleamed avariciously.

"Fine, be a whiny lil' bitch about it. You done tenderizin' yerself fer me, then?"

"Wait, what?" Conrad asked shakily, still mentally choking from the sudden death of his erection. He was utterly unnerved at how Luce could make such huge subject switches without even blinking. Or giving him any warning.

Huffing in annoyance, Luce reached into the tub and poked his sharp nail into Conrad's pale leg hard enough to draw blood. Conrad whined unhappily and the vampire tasted the red on the tip of his nail, nodding.

"Yeah, yer done cookin', now get out." Luce slapped at his naked thigh. "I'm starved."

"What in the – I am not your fucking snack-machine!" Conrad exclaimed heatedly, rubbing at where Luce had bled him. He was getting incredibly sick of interrupting his own sentences. A small scoot and he was properly plastered flat against the opposite side of the tub, giving the vampire a surly and offended and uncooperative not-pout. As usual, he felt vulnerable and distinctly at odds with the idea of being naked around Luce. And very, very sore that he was being this demanding. Did the bastard just expect that, if he ran an errand, he'd get a free meal out of it? Was he really that fucking privileged and lazy and dickish?

_Well_ _duh_, a very helpful part of him said, offering him absolutely no solution as to how to prevent these kind of vital misconceptions in the future.

"Yeah ya are," Luce snorted, giving him a roguish smirk that sort of made Conrad's stomach jerk a little, not helped by the fact that Luce's white hand was now wandering his knee, long nails skimming at water-droplets. "Still works the same. Ya put somethin' in, ya get somethin' out. From you, I want snackies, so getcher ass up."

"And … what are you willing to put in?" Conrad asked after a moment, voice firmer than he had anticipated.

He was surprised at his own steadiness and his complete lack of what-the-fuck. But he wasn't so much _agreeing_ to his status as a snack machine as lunging for the chance to make this a deal with guidelines. This was the first time conditions had been mentioned, after all, instead of just 'Well, hey, you were too weak to stop me.' Which, in Luce's defense, left his victim with a comforting lack of inner conflict.

"Dangerous way to ask, puppy," Luce tsked, flashing his fangs in a skeezy grin. "Question is, what wouldn't I shove inta you?"

"Christ, you are _such_ a pig. Bat. Whatever," Conrad sighed, palm making a crisp pap as he slapped his forehead for what felt like the umpteenth time that night. He wiped the water off of his face and stared dispassionately at the vampire, who was still lurking like a smug sexual-predator-slash-vulture on the edge of his tub. "I was thinking something like 'a ten minute warning before I invade your privacy.'"

"But then it wouldn't be yer privacy, now would it," Luce reasoned, hand wandering lower. It skimmed the inside of Conrad's leg before the coroner could realize what was happening, or place the indulgent quirk in the vampire's smile. "Sides. You seem'ta like my surprises."

With that, Luce easily leaned into the bathtub and pushed his chilly hand between Conrad's legs. His fingers curled around his flagging shaft and made Conrad gasp and bite down hard on his lip. Even though the first touch sent amazing orange-red sparks through his curled body, Conrad caught him by the stick-thin wrist and leaned away, breath catching. Luce shot him a look that was equal parts _what, are you crazy?_ and _what is it _now_, faggot_? Conrad thoroughly resented the second half of that glance (and wanted to scream _yes_ to the first half), but managed to swallow and, after another second, speak.

"It's … uh, awkward. With you so far away. Like that."

God, that hadn't come out right; what he meant was _the angle of your arm is awkward and it might hurt or something and I've seen how fucking strong you are and I am _not_ getting my dick ripped off if you sneeze _but Luce was already looking at him like the coroner had spent all week pining after him, waiting by his balcony door with his hands clasped under his chin.

Conrad wanted to refute that idea with his _fist_ (some sad people might get off on the idea of being stalked by a mystical creature of the night and having them watch you sleep and shit but to him it was just plain psycho), but didn't say anything. The dangling lure of having the vampire in the tub with him, skin slick and shiny, body on top of his, skinny scarred legs tangled with his … he had to look away, hoping his neck wasn't red. He took a shaky breath.

"You half-ass this, you're not getting anything from me. So … get in already. Or something."

"Ain't gettin' my clothes wet," Luce protested. The look on his prickly face was intensely grouchy, like he was sort of realizing that what Conrad was doing was commonly classified as 'upping the stakes' and he wasn't sure he was okay with it. He was definitely hungry, though, and thus was less inclined to bitch.

"Then take them off," Conrad said, managing to inject a little _god, you are an idiot_ into his voice, which he was sort of proud of. When Luce simply glared at the surface of the water like it was hiding truly troubling things, Conrad smirked at him a little cheekily. "I thought zombies hated water, not vampires?"

That mistrustful stare was transferred to Conrad, then to the plethora of colorfully packaged body washes and bath salts lining the opposite edge of his tub. Luce's lip curled up over his fangs.

"If you try and soap me up er some shit—"

"I won't," Conrad put in quickly, knowing he probably would have taken a stab at it if Luce hadn't said that.

The compulsion to get the emaciated man clean and _presentable _was just too strong, and Luce had already managed to build up an accumulation of grime since last week, almost like he had found a garbage bin to roll around in. Still, Conrad was beyond amused at the image of wrangling the vampire into the tub and forcing shampoo in his hair. Maybe he could even hold him down and clip his nails afterwards as Luce sat there like a surly mutt. Then came the image of the vampire bowling out of his bathroom, naked and sopping on all fours like a dog escaping a pet-shop bath, which would have made Conrad laugh hysterically except that Luce was on his feet and unbuttoning his shirt with a disdainful snort.

Conrad kind of _really_ hated how he tensely sat up and stared like a starved teenager as Luce stripped in front of him. He tried to see every bit of him, not even caring about how obvious he was being. The artist's eyes plowed reverently up Luce's tough, scar-mottled side and the jut of his hip, lingering on the trail of blond fuzz below his laceration-thin navel. Memorizing him for later. Maybe for paper — or maybe for other nights when his fantasies wouldn't get interrupted by the real thing, because Conrad realized he was kind of hopelessly strung out over the undead man known as Luce Worth just about the time that the vampire stepped into the bath and Conrad found he couldn't breathe.

Looking at him like that, nude and emaciated and smirking and _in his bathtub_, Conrad realized he wanted to do many, many nasty things to Luce.

His repertoire of _things_ was pitifully limited to about two acts, and neither was anywhere near nasty mastery, but he would learn new, ever-more dastardly things just to do them to Luce. He visually ate up the scrawny body in front of him until, a little disappointingly, Luce sank to his knees into the warm water and a shiver plowed down his narrow back. But then his claws teased in between Conrad's knees and the coroner made a noise that was a cross between a moan and a request for marriage, spreading his legs so quickly it brought shame on all of his ancestors.

But the motion let Luce in, above him, on _top of him_, and suddenly breathing was so very, very difficult that it felt like he would be joining them soon, so he could explain his personal failings in person.

"Yer a high-maintenance lil' princess, aren'tcha," Luce murmured against the wetness on Conrad's neck, half water and half sweat that tingled deliciously when the vampire blew on it, short and sweet.

The tickle sent sparks up Conrad's thighs and made him want to yank the other man back into his neck when the vampire drew away, pupils reduced to excited pinpricks in his cherry-red eyes. Luce's preternatural stillness and lack of breathing hit Conrad all over again as he held those unnatural eyes, striking him as unbelievably tense and exotic in the dark, quiet room when paired with his cool skin and _seriously,_ he was not a necrophiliac. Seriously.

It was just … fuck, it was _Luce_.

"Have to make you … work for your meals," Conrad whispered back, skin thrilling at how stupid or daring he was being.

Luce's eyes glinted with some kind of appreciation — either because the coroner had butted the facts of the matter head-on, with a distinct lack of reverence, or because he was finally adapting to this fucked-up situation in a way that let him enjoy it — before he bent forward and pushed his tongue behind his ear, making Conrad jerk and whimper and grab for the back of Luce's neck, pulling him closer.

Obviously amused by his handsy streak, Luce snickered against his pink neck, but the noise was replaced soon enough by a low, absent grunt as Conrad got even handsier in the way that mattered, sort of forgetting that this was supposed to be _his_ payment for being a snack machine. But groping at Luce sort of _was_ his payment: most people didn't understand how much of a treat it was to touch someone else after years and years of nothing. Made him feel connected. Made him feel like there was a purpose to this outside a mediocre burst of grey and a clean up.

Moved by that difference, Conrad leaned up and brushed his mouth against Luce's cool lips. Their noses bumped together and Luce even seemed a little put-off by the gentleness of the touch, but solved the problem quickly enough with a crush of his mouth. Heart pounding, Conrad even dared to push the very tip of his tongue against Luce's long, smooth fangs. His breath froze in his throat as Luce slowed the kiss long enough for the coroner to inspect those thin, sharp shards of him, then Conrad sighed in relief and ragged arousal when the vampire sucked his tongue deeper into his mouth and made him move onwards to short, sharp movements and muffled noises.

Apparently it took just long enough to build up a tantalizing rhythm of groping and kissing for Luce to get bored: Conrad's eyes came around from their blissful vacation into the back of his skull when he felt the vampire's free hand running lightly over his neck. The pointed contact dissolved into the net of sensations rushing him until Luce hit the place that he always bit down, right over the dark thumping vein, and Conrad flinched back and gasped. Luce's callused fingers scraped over the tiny rises of tight pale scar tissue and his entire neck tightened, a jolt of sweet white something running into the highway of his spine and making his body do quick, jerky, desperate things. Conrad hiked up his leg, making the water crash against the side of the tub.

"Oh fuck, y-yes?"

Even as he drowned in it, such an intense, invasive burst of pleasure from such a strange area was very unexpected. The whisper had an awkward upward swing to it that had Conrad frowning even as the shudders swarmed up behind his ears and then dissipated. Luce didn't fail to notice his confusion.

"You askin' me if that feels good?" he snickered mockingly. Another pass of his rough thumb answered his question beyond a shadow of a doubt: Conrad grit his teeth and dug his fingers into Luce's arm, whimpering. Luce leaned close with a nasty grin, so close it looked like he was inspecting every blood-cell of flush on the human's twisted face. "Christ. Lookit you, Connie. Yer hot for it like a fuckin' doll."

Conrad didn't know what that meant but resented it so fucking hard he was nearly shaking. He was about to convince himself he was physically capable of snapping that Luce better actually get to work and stop dicking around (because, in reality, he feared he was going to lose it all if Luce kept rubbing his fingers over the damned bitemarks), but he was saved the guaranteed disappointment when Luce dipped down and nipped at his pink neck just once before sliding down his wet chest.

With a quick, ragged breath, it was all Conrad could do to grab hold of the sides of the tub and arch back, watching hazily and almost uncomprehendingly as Luce went down and down. A few minutes later, his spine was twisting and he yanked the vampire's hair as his hips jolted and he came so hard his head hit the back of the tub, punctuated by a startled and vehement curse.

He remained an utterly satisfied, gasping lump of resolved sexual frustration as Luce drew back, clearing his throat and taking a moment to conscientiously lick his lips and his fingertips, cleaning them of any stray saltiness.

"That's the appetizer done with," he said with an evil grin, scraping his nails over Conrad's pink and perfectly exposed neck. "How bout the main course?"

"Murgh," Conrad murmured in a way that was deeply disappointed and hopeless and faintly amused all at the same time. Then he just closed his eyes and didn't move, which Luce took as an acceptable indication of his readiness. He really didn't need any more of a go-ahead than a lack of running and screaming and anyone would be a fool to think otherwise.

The orgasmic haze was so strong that Conrad only tensed a little when Luce's stringy arm forced itself between his back and the tub, lifting him up a little. Pausing only to lick his neck clean, Luce bit down for the fifth time and Conrad grunted, then let the heat and the perverse, twisting pleasure drag him underneath the surface of the water, which had suddenly turned black and silky hot. The experience turned into something else entirely when he didn't fight it, and he heard himself moan but didn't do anything to stop it, mind sucked somewhere outside his clean bathroom. He only felt enough to realize he sort of fucking loved the way his legs were pushed up around Luce's skinny sides, so he tightened them and rode the roar of heat in his shivering body.

He gasped as it came to an end, pushing weakly against Luce's hard, warming chest, then sagged back against the tub, hitting his head in the exact same spot, which he felt was going to be _very_ sore tomorrow, but he was feeling so good and tired he couldn't care less. He realized his arms were looped around Luce's wet chest and he tugged a little, wanting that body pressed against his to complete the hedonist smear of his existence. But Luce's skinny arms, braced against the tub, held out like toothpicks.

Apparently satisfied, Luce sat back and sucked on his own lip, but his expression of ecstasy quickly condensed into one of sullenness and irritation. He bared his red-glazed teeth, head falling forward tiredly.

"Fer fuck's _sake_, will you eat a fuckin' french-fry?" he groaned like he had a stomach-ache. "Eatin off'a you is like goin' veggie. Yer bloods fuckin' _green_."

"Going veggie?" Conrad repeated faintly, pondering his religion of buying only organic produce and eating vegetarian when he had the chance. Then he thought it was pretty impressive that he was managing words and curiosity after being fed off of. He was also thinking that this was really bad if he was getting so accustomed to it that it didn't phase him as much — hadn't he passed out the first time Luce had fed from him?

The progression alone made him want to sink underneath the surface of the now-cool, dingy water and bubble himself into oblivion.

"Eh, some sad saps munch on cows and horses and crap. Anything to keep from sinkin' their teeth into people and maybe killin' em."

Conrad frowned, trying to listen at all or think about anything other than the fact that he was relatively sure that Luce hadn't gotten off and maybe he wanted to do something about that if only he weren't so goddamn mushy all over. Then Conrad opened his mouth, about to say that the animal-thing sort of sounded like what _he_ did or would do, but Luce shut him up with a dismissive gesture.

"Most of 'em end up going fuckin' nuts, though. Not something any vamp in his right mind would consider long-term. Any more'n a month and you start seein' shit. Tastes awful."

And that was the last Luce had to say before he made another satisfied-enough noise and got his long, gangly form up from the tub with a big yet far-away splash of cool water. Conrad couldn't convince himself to open his eyes long enough to admire his narrow ass again, but paid way too much attention to the complex sounds of the vampire drying off and getting dressed beside the tub. The heavy, comforting haze of after-feeding had left him with just one luscious sense, so he used the hell out of it.

It was relatively trippy, now that he had something (hard narcotics) to compare it to. The fact he never, ever would have experienced that without the vampire hit him square in the brain, and that wasn't even considering the fact he emerged from it completely unscathed and actually a little _liberated_. Christ, was he actually lucky he had Luce in his life?

The thought was too terrifying to consider.

"Yer gonna drown if you stay in there," came Luce's voice from far away, a long time later or maybe just a few seconds.

"Don't worry about me," Conrad heard himself murmur, now focusing on the water lapping and settling around his shoulders. It was slick and velvety and cool. Nice.

"Ain't worryin', just statin' fact," Luce answered curtly.

Conrad hmmed. The vampire's voice seemed closer, suddenly, as did his hands, which were groping along the coroner's clammy legs and shoulders. Conrad hummed again, this time confusedly.

"Yer like those fuckin turkeys. Too stupid not to get outta the rain."

"Hey — _hey_!" Conrad yelled as he realized he was being lifted _out_ of the tub and all the water fell from his body and slapped back into the tub. He twisted and clung to Luce's neck like a child as he was carried out of the bathroom. "What are you — _hey_!"

He remained knotted around the vampire's shoulders until Luce forcefully pried his clammy hands away and tossed him down. Conrad didn't have time to cry out before he hit the bed, bouncing to a halt on his stomach with a supremely overwhelmed look on his face. He peered around at his dark bedroom, confused, then shivered a little as Luce's hand wandered along his ass with an appreciative noise.

He shifted a little, then snarled as Luce touched the sore patch on his right ass-cheek and _bit into it_ in the same second, rudely ripping the top off of the hazy memories of the first time he'd bit it and what the holy fuck did he think he was doing? _Damnit,_ was he trying to permanently scar his ass with his teeth?

_Well duh_, that helpful part of him said again; it was the part that wasn't listening to Luce snickering and licking his ass and then his chops, but instead focusing on the dull ache in his butt. Conrad lay there and cursed and growled into the sheets, still feeling unbearably strung-out from the blood-sucking thing. Then, knowing something was amiss deep in his gay-man brain, he looked down in horror at the dark splotches on his red coverlet, bleeding out from his shiny, clammy ass and legs.

"My fucking duvet!" he shrieked, clambering off, naked and ridiculous.

Luce's obnoxious laughter was all he needed to hear to know that this was _so_ much more about torturing him and leaving his mark on his ass than making sure he was alright. Conrad grabbed a pillow and chucked it in the general direction of the noise, blood-sugar headache already gnawing at him. His ass ached something miserable.

"Fuck you, Luce! God, just … fuck you so hard!"

"Heh. Get me a real update on Hanna and I might just letcha. Deal goes two ways, princess. Keep yer window open fer me."

The pillow flopped onto the floor and Conrad's balcony door clicked shut, and he was left naked and panting and squeaky clean and, god forbid, counting the seconds until Luce came back and did something else to him.


	17. Dead Space

A/N: It's about time you two actually sat down and talked, you adorable imbeciles! We got crap to figure out! Don't you know there's a plot afoot?

[sings] OHH WHOOOO, WHOOO'S THAT LAAAY-DEH

_Warnings: disturbing themes/imagery, angst, bromaaaaaance_

* * *

Dead Space

* * *

He was at work.

Or, at least that was what the desks and the papers suggested. The dark, uniform furniture of the police station stood in a perfect grid pattern around him, folding outwards in a dulled, motionless hall-of-mirrors effect. The concrete building dissolved into grey haze after five identical desks. He started to look at the rows of paling desks, started to wonder about them, but then he remembered that he was at work, so he sat down at _his_ desk and reached for his pen.

Someone came by and put papers on his desk. He sighed quietly and put them next to the others, forming them into small stacks. Men and women came in and out of the haze, sometimes walking and sometimes striding with purpose, but always with their eyes on the floor until they passed and threw something in front of him.

Their pace, no matter how fast or slow, left wakes in the stale air. The little winking distortions slithered into his periphery while utter stillness clustered around him like plaster. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair as, _thwak_, another pile of papers slapped onto his desk.

Frowning, he picked up a print-out that had been knocked loose. He realized it was a missing person's report — all of these were missing persons reports, piled high enough to make his desk crack — and held it up to the watery light at exactly the moment that Chief Lobinski walked down his aisle, dress shoes cracking against the floor.

He ducked instantly, one hand shading his eyes as he looked down hard at his lap. He didn't breathe; he braced himself against the dangerous blankness that crowded around him with the simple removal of the base-beat that made him human. He hoped the quiet wouldn't have time to take root in his chest and grow into something horrible, but then the metronome of the man's feet passed and Lobinski went into the grey again.

He breathed out.

What began as a moment of aching relief from not being recognized as Conrad's cousin tightened into unease when he tried to talk to the next woman who passed by his desk. Pushing his hair back, he said something with a hint of a chuckle. She didn't answer or even look up, but carded through her papers and, like every one else, sat them on his desk, which creaked from the weight of so many lost souls. Then she left.

Frowning, he waited until a man followed her. He got up and came out from behind his desk, saying something else, but the man stepped around him effortlessly, eyes passing over him like he wasn't an orange shirt or a black tie or a pleading expression or even skin and bone.

Then he realized: they couldn't see him.

He turned to a woman who had been there as long as he couldn't remember, standing at an opposite desk in the grey room, and said _hey_ but nothing came out. He realized he hadn't said anything since he arrived, not really. Not in the way they could hear.

The flutter of panic congealed in his paralyzed chest, twisting into threads that webbed up his throat and tried to twine around his spine. He stepped forward, not knowing what he was doing until he grabbed her arm and his voice blared embarrassingly loud in his own ears: **HEY**. He flinched back, deeply startled.

The pretty woman turned and looked at him, bright green eyes narrowing as if she was having trouble keeping him in focus. She wasn't the only one. Where did he stop and start, again?

"Who are you?" she asked.

The simple question hit him at his core. It was no simple request for his name, fake or real. It struck his sounding-rod bones so sharply, right underneath the flimsy simplified mask of his skin, that the impact received only one mournful, resounding tone in answer.

"I don't know," he answered. He suddenly felt all of his floating parts, the utter improbability holding his limbs together around the hole inside of him. How had he not collapsed under the slightest of scrutiny? He shook his head. "I don't know anything about myself."

The woman's doll face went cold between the silver curtains of her long hair. Suspicious. He realized he had seen her before, but could only taste rum when he tried to remember. He winced when her hand slapped around his wrist and turned it over: sharpied into the wiry crease of his arm was a thick, stubby cross. Her bright green eyes snapped back to his, now almost angry.

"Who are you to a dead boy?"

He felt his own eyes go wide. Before he could answer, he heard a word — a single word, more important than any other word — come out of the mist, past the fifth row of desks. Something flared like dark lightning beyond it and there was a swath of red hair and a flash of skinny stitched-up limbs.

He heard the word again and it hooked into his staples and tugged him forward, taking the very air with it. He had to follow it or else be caught in a vacuum. Breath catching, he gave his loaded work-desk one more glance only to find that all the papers — all those missing people – were gone.

High above him, near the infinite grey ceiling, he thought he heard a grateful flapping like a thousand paper wings.

"I have to go," he told the woman apologetically, turning away from her suddenly headless body.

Scores of people stepped slowly from the closing mist, all liquid-moving mannequins in starched suits, all without heads. Grey mist filled the space above their smoothly sealed-off necks. With small blind steps, they huddled closer, but he couldn't pay them any mind. They were just as lost as he would be if he didn't know where he was going.

He pulled at his tie to loosen it, already loping into the grey haze with a determined expression.

"I think Hanna needs me."

"Not everyone gets a second chance," the woman called out, voice very sharp for not having a mouth.

"I know," he called back and disappeared into the grey. "I'll take good care of my first one."

For a while, the only color was his orange shoes, swinging one in front of the other, shadowing the base-beat of his husk of a heart. He couldn't keep running forever so he slowed to a walk, realizing speed didn't do any good here. He wandered, calling Hanna's name. He could feel the two crisp syllables leave his lips and search for something to strike in the half-dark, streaking cleanly towards their destination. The cross that Hanna was. They would find the place where his thin green arms met in the middle, where he drew his secrets.

Names had power. A name was a word was a thing was a promise was a life was a purpose. He didn't have one – he knew that was the Word he had heard earlier, shrouded in mist with the contours and colors of a life but denying the full image much less the weight and texture of it – and maybe that was the reason for the gap at his center. Maybe once he found his, he could be a whole person again. Maybe if he found Hanna, he would know what do to once he did.

"Hanna!" He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted it again to the shifting ether. "Hanna, where are you?"

"Hanna is not a boy's name," the woman said, suddenly in front of him with that same suspicious look on her pretty face. He didn't have time to be surprised or irritated but she had her head back, so that was alright.

"I know. He's a zombie," he explained as patiently as he could, looking around the grey plane with an anxious expression. He stepped to the side, craning over. He wished there was a desk or a bed he could look under. Hanna was small and so he seemed suited for small mischievous spaces. "And I need to find him. He's always with me, and now I'm afraid something's happened."

"Why don't you look where you put him last?"

Turning, he was about to say that Hanna didn't really stay still for long these days, and he wasn't a vase or a book-bag you could track back and find again, but there was something in her eyes that froze him to the quick. She smiled and he was horrified. Before he could think or say _you can't mean that_ or realize he didn't even know what she meant, the grey parted into fog and he saw wet black dirt being thrown over a ragged patch of night sky.

After the first two shovelfuls, he could feel it weighing on him and realized his back was wet and sinking into black mud. His limbs were stiffening, his skin going cold and creaking like rotting grey bark around his hollow bones. He gasped and thrashed, but as his withering green hands grasped at the side of the grave, it crumbled onto him, only adding to the dark pulsations of dirt covering his chest and forcing their way into his mouth.

"I didn't let him die! It wasn't me!" he yelled but nothing came out, just like before.

He could feel her hateful green eyes on him and knew that she had heard him: real words went through air, but her words carried through dirt and darkness and his had been carried to her with the sickening-sweet smell of formaldehyde. She leaned over, silver hair obscuring her face as the patch of sky got further and further away, receding into a star-studded scar in a crypt of pressing wet black.

"If you don't know who you are, how do you know who you aren't?"

The dirt pressed harder and harder with every scraping shovelful of weight, and then the sky disappeared completely. Black hardened all around him, trapping his last breath in his hollow chest. The stillness was so much more than silence, so much more than paralysis, but then it wasn't so much about the dirt pushing into his mouth as something drawing that dirt in.

Panicking at the sudden shift in pressure, he wanted to shove his hands to his bulging throat but the weight of the grave soil had put cold fingers around his wrists. More dark hands twisted out of the soil and latched onto his chest, pushing and grabbing and finally yanking at the five chilly points of his staples. His skin ripped and with a soundless scream he was turning inside out, unraveling at the twists in his chest as the vacuum reversed into a roar of hatred and silence and coldness.

He pushed against the hands so hard he knew he would break his brittle bones, yelling desperately around the evil that poured out of him like tar and pooled in his grave like poisoned groundwater, but it only made it come out _faster_.

"—ey! Hey, it's okay! Dante! Dante, wake up!"

Suddenly, there were words in the madness. The voice was young and splitting and the only thing that didn't echo: it pierced the blackness and brought him to the surface. He realized he was physically pushing against that fetid membrane and the five chilly tightnesses on each of his wrists. Choking, he pushed as hard as he could and the voice sounded again. It didn't matter what it said — stitches, _stitches –_ but he followed it and met it head-on and the slam snapped him back and suddenly his eyes were open and his sheets were tangled around his feet.

After a moment of pulling stale air into his scraped-out chest, the Detective realized he was cold with sweat, lying in his rumpled bed and staring up at the two blue points glowing anxiously in the complete blackness of his bedroom.

"What … Hanna?" he said, startled down to his soul by the sound of his voice, ragged and hoarse.

Hanna didn't like the sound of it either by the look on his round face, which was slowly coming into focus as a pointy green nose and worried eyes hiding behind glasses and an effusive aqua glow. The zombie was on his stomach, holding his arms to the mattress. The pressure he had felt. When he was asleep.

A dream.

"Oh man, you're awake. _Good_," the zombie exclaimed, letting go of his wrists with a relieved, shaky noise. One of his hands drifted to his wrist, and he rubbed at the meticulous line of stitches there. "You almost popped my hand off! And gave me a black eye or a green eye or something! Seriously, you're crazy-strong when you're asleep. You okay?"

"What?" was all he could manage, putting a hand over his dry eyes.

He had meant to steady himself by speaking, but instead spent the last breath he had taken in the dream. The one word took everything out of the older man, making his arms shake. His bedroom was too dark: the void crept slowly out of his mind and into his throat, leaving him swallowing the black feeling down.

"You were snoring, then you weren't snoring and then you were yelling," Hanna explained in the silence. He looked down at the Detective as if confused by his squeezed, uncomfortable expression, then had the good grace to remember that living humans actually needed to breathe and that sitting on their stomachs generally wasn't good for them.

Scrambling off of his partner, Hanna sat himself on the bed and watched intently as the older man propped himself up on his elbow with unusual slowness. After a moment, he rubbed miserably at his unshaven face as the dream came back to him in full, knotting him up again. Hanna twiddled his green thumbs together, lower lip poking out.

"I, uh, ran in and tried to wake you up. And sort of tackled you. Then you sort of punched me but I guess I deserved it for tackling you? And now we're here. I was about to go walking so I'm really glad I waited a minute to download the rest of those songs and get that high score on that metal unicorn game and finish that chapter on — _woah_."

It took the Detective a minute to look up, wondering only how there could be a chapter on the interjection '_woah'_, but he realized what had stopped Hanna's compulsive stream of words. In leaning to the side, his undershirt had fallen down his chest, revealing the malevolent glint of one cold, chunky staple. The zombie's blue eyes were fixed on it and the Detective's hand came up before he could think about it, but he stopped at digging his fingers into the betraying piece of clothing.

He stayed perfectly still, like the realization wouldn't go any further if he didn't move, but Hanna's face twisted up piece by piece and the small zombie finally spoke.

"What … happened?"

The Detective gave him a look so caught and singularly helpless and wretched and _lost_ that Hanna ducked his head with an ashamed noise, fingers wandering over his own neck stitches.

"Oh. Guess that's a … stupid question, huh."

His scar had happened in the dark, before he woke up a year ago, and the Detective's growing fear of that time period was reflected in his almond eyes and the defensive, stoic tightness of his jaw. Hanna looked no calmer: the constant light of his blue eyes belied the shifting emotions underneath. He gnawed at his lip hesitantly, awkward empathy and worry in the twist of his brows. After a moment, Hanna raised his hand cautiously.

"Can I …?" he trailed off hopefully or miserably, fingers already curling inwards.

His partner looked at him blankly for a moment. A buried part of him railed at the injustice of the fact that they should be able to talk about _this_ when Hanna had dodged the fact of his scarred back. Never mind, of course, that neither of them knew anything about the various mutilations to the fabric of their selves, much less the ones they could see. But why should it be him? It just wasn't fair.

After a nightmare like that, it was hard to remember that he actually wanted to find out what had happened to him. Sometimes it seemed so much safer not to look down, not to touch. To just take the life in front of him and not look back towards that cloud of forgotten danger, growing in density and awful certainty as the nights piled up. Sometimes it seemed like if he entered it he would never come out. But that night, Hanna's wide eyes and the nearly crushing push of _help you_ in his young, unassuming, _dead_ face won out.

It took him a moment to reclaim his body. As Hanna watched, the Detective sat upright on his squeaky mattress, slowly breathed out and lifted his shirt, then, brow furrowing, tugged it over his head entirely. It was something he abruptly needed to do: have the mutilation seen in its entirety, when even he had striven to only catch it in his periphery, half-obscured by undershirts and hidden underneath his collarbone and chin in the shower. The cheap white cotton fell to the side.

Now his chest was completely bare, a twisting S of healthy peach skin. The staples glinted in the low blue light from the window. He felt naked and raw: a wound stitched but unhealed. The older man forced himself to watch the zombie's face as Hanna looked at him, awe and discomfort making his small Adam's apple bob. Hanna's green hand hovered for a moment before touching down on the uppermost twist of skin, fingertips grating in the groove. The Detective grit his teeth.

"Does it hurt?" Hanna asked quickly but his hand stayed, cool and light.

The Detective thought about it, then shook his head. Not physical pain, at the least.

"It just feels like ice. Every time."

He was always cold there. It felt like there was a wall just underneath his skin and every time someone or something touched it, it was like banging on a container only to hear the hollow boom. He felt like he had been scooped out and stitched up over the cavern. The echoes abruptly stopped at his ribs, though, leaving him feeling like he was a normal human, all flexible limbs and shoulders and pelvis and churning head, constructed around a void. A void that could turn into a vacuum at any moment and suck in his fraying skin and anything he cared about.

"What were you dreaming about?" Hanna asked, as if reading his mind. The Detective looked up, startled, then shook his head with difficulty.

"I'm not sure. Just a nightmare, I think."

Just a nightmare, except that it was terrifying in a way he couldn't describe and there had been glimmers of it before, though small. They had increased considerably since the incident with the sea-witch. If the dream originated in his chest, the half-selkie's violent spell had loosened his staples and opened his chest a crack, letting foul vapors into the dark of the bedroom and his sleep.

And that woman with the silver hair. He had seen her before, he was sure of it. The older man breathed out into his hand, and wiped the last of the drying sweat from his face and murmured:

"I haven't been … sleeping well since the warehouse."

"You mean after the spell and everything? That's weird," Hanna said slowly. He pursed his lips and tapped at his knee, obviously already sorting through the circadian repercussions of being in the presence of a seal-breaking spell.

"Actually, I haven't been sleeping well since the housing project."

He would say he admitted it just to stop the noisy churn of Hanna's dusty library mind, but it was also very true. With very few exceptions, he had been sleeping restlessly since the encounter with the djinn, but that might have been because he had too much to think about. He had been absorbing a lot of changes in his life that would have knocked a lesser man off his mental horse, or driven him insane. It was getting harder and harder to draw the line between supernatural factors and his own indecipherable twists, if just because he was sure the latter was more powerful. In front of him, Hanna shrugged.

"Well, heh, uh … it's more than a little disturbing," Hanna said with a forwardness that almost shocked the older man. The zombie poked his glasses up his nose and settled in earnest on the bed, crossing his legs and wrapping his hands around his tiny ankles. He rocked a little, wiggling his busy green toes. "I mean, you killed something."

For a moment, faced with the unwavering headlights of Hanna's eyes, all the Detective could do was stare. To hear Hanna admit something so meaningful, so concisely, made him realize that the dead boy in front of him, underneath all of his irreverent fast-moving noisiness, was very, very aware of his old job and the occasional lengths it pushed him to. It was a little shocking to discover such vitality of credo after only a few days of the real Hanna Falk Cross. The run-in with the hunters three nights ago began the Detective's suspicions, but this set Hanna's lurking maturity in stone.

Hanna wasn't a boy, he just looked like one. Hanna could be solemn, he just didn't like to be. He saw good and evil, but above all he saw life. The zombie shrugged again.

"It was a living thing with thoughts and free will and a family except demons don't have families, but, you know. It's not like a simple equation: iron rod, djinn, bam or whatever. You even got a faceful of blood. It was the first time you'd done something like that. I mean … I _hope_ it was the first time you'd done something like that?" Hanna finished with a squirming up-swing of his voice that made the Detective smile despite himself.

"Only crickets and the occasional spider," he said, voice still horribly hoarse.

Hanna sat back looking assured that he wasn't partners with a serial killer and that was of great relief to him. Suddenly, the Detective's smile widened. It was as if some of the darkness had cleared from the bedroom and the moment suddenly made a little more sense.

Just like he had said to Hanna the night before, he was who he had been all along and, regardless of the convolutions of his subconscious, his hesitance at this entire subject was nothing but encouraging. He had not disappeared as a decent man and woken up a serial killer, or vice versa. There was a very small chance that either of them would find their previous life shocking on grounds of their personal actions, and that was something to hold on to.

In front of him, Hanna leaned forward, smile gaining a foothold between the stitches running down his cheeks.

"And hey, I mean, you did _really_ good. You were like some kind of action movie guy with that shotgun! I really thought we were going to die," Hanna confided in him behind his hand. "But I didn't want to say so in case it might've messed up your mojo or something."

The Detective couldn't think of anything more lethal to 'mojo' than the certainty of impending death, and mentally thanked Hanna for his tact, but settled for a tired, "You weren't the only one."

"That djinn was crazy powerful. Total Quran ass-kicker. Really, the more I think about it, it's kind of weird we were able to take it out. I mean, if I had to do it again, I think I'd spend a month or two collecting runes and buy a gym membership or something. And drink a tub of steroids. I guess we're just lucky the thing stayed still long enough for you to—"

Hanna made a popping noise out of the corner of his mouth and mimed a stabbing motion, following it with a rather wretched grin. The Detective looked out of the small bedroom window, suddenly uneasy for an entirely different reason.

"That's the thing. I don't know if it was luck."

He saw Hanna's expression go blank and, for a moment, didn't know how to elaborate. It was just something he felt. After the fevered pace of the battle and the viciousness of the djinn – its complete willingness to kill and its verbal pact to do so – the fact that it had just laid down and practically _allowed_ him to stab it through was unsettling to him. He kept reliving that surreal moment where the tangle of dark muscle and hatred and magic, death incarnate, just loosened and went quiet, followed by the breaking blow of the rod jolting up his stiff arms. The flood of black warmth over his palms.

"It was almost as if it waited for me to kill it."

"Well, then … uh." Hanna's scavenger hunt for a bright side was visible in the dubious crunch of his brows. "Lucky we knocked it out before it could play its part in that whole big looming plan-thing it was talking about?"

"Sacrificial lamb is also a role. Something I don't think the higher-ups in hell would mention," he pointed out, answered by nothing but more startled silence. He wondered only after the words had left his mouth how his mind was working so cleanly and rationally. If the dream had scraped him raw, at least nothing was blocking his mouth anymore. He just didn't know how many thoughts had been hiding there.

Still, they couldn't afford to think that everything hadn't gone to plan for the djinn and his fellows: assuming they had outsmarted both it and the over-arcing plan was edging on hubris. They needed to plan for worst-case-scenario if they had any hope of halting this thing before it could escalate. Claim more peoples' lives.

"Man, tough luck. Tough luck for an evil bastard who killed one guy and tried to kill two more, but still," Hanna muttered at length, absent-mindedly tracing shapes into the mattress with his finger. He looked up mid-triangle, propping his chin on his hand.

"But why would they send one of their guys to get killed? How does that do anything? I mean, djinn blood is really powerful, but it only works fresh and knocking off an old djinn for it seems pretty over-kill. And by the way, you got kind of covered in the stuff so if anything weird happens let me know, okay, but seriously, why do it at all? Nothing makes sense right now."

"Looks like we need some more research," the Detective said unhappily, shaking his head. The idea of more data was usually favorable, unless it came packaged along with more violent deaths, which was a surety in this case. Maybe this time they would show up in time to help. All they could do was hope.

"Man, this is shaping up to be really shifty. Sounds like a classic end of the world plot from the sci-fi channel or something," Hanna said with an uncomfortable laugh.

Seeing his partner's harrowed expression, however, he immediately stifled it. The djinn had literally spoken of a shift overtaking their world and the older man, new to the supernatural realm and the blurry zig-zag of truth within it, couldn't quite bring himself to joke about it. Hanna cleared his throat and plucked at one of the white tufts in his shocking red hair.

"Nothing we can't handle, right Malcolm?"

"Nothing that sounds like it's going to pan out anytime soon, anyways," his partner said with a sigh, reaching for his shirt. The small zombie watched blankly, eyes glowing curiously as he tugged it over his head again. "In the meantime, we can focus on you."

"And you," Hanna protested, then tilted his head. It was an old gesture of his locked self that was vastly improved by the twist of his mouth and the finger to his nose. "Although lately they're starting to seem like the same thing …"

Assuming the hunters were telling the truth, the Detective thought stonily. That connection was almost too much to think about. Part of him didn't want to accept it if just because of the bigger gap it left in him (the sheer lack of connection to his proposed past was staggering), but this was the first time they had openly spoken about Hanna's state of being since the warehouse. Everything had been moving too quickly, and Hanna didn't seem to like focusing on himself when there were so many dead ends. The Detective felt like it was his job as a partner to make the young zombie at least map out those dead ends, in case a trap door suddenly appeared.

"Let's focus on what we know for fact. You have your memories but you can't get to them." He spread his hands. "What do you want to do?"

"I don't know. Veser said he can't do anything about it, and he seemed like a pretty up-there sea-witch." Hanna squinted down at his bare feet, definitely unhappy. He gnawed at a knuckle. "One option is going to someone higher up. Maybe we can go visit that Lamont guy and see if he has any powerful magicians on his payroll?"

The Detective tried not to look as grim as he felt: the idea of going through another harrowing spell right then, so close to the first instance he thought Hanna had re-died, did not sound appealing.

"It's an option. Or we could find the hunters again and ask them if you had a social circle of some sort. The person who put the rune on your back, for instance. Someone must have known what you were doing before you disappeared," he suggested, almost equally displeased with the notion if it meant going through Casimiro and Finas.

Hanna nodded vaguely, then seemed incapable of doing anything more as the Detective waited for a verdict of some kind. His pensive frown slumped into something far more dejected, and his eyes began to dim. After a moment of sitting and watching the zombie's round face sink onto the cradle of his hand, his partner put a hand on his knee.

"Hanna?"

"Sorry," Hanna muttered as if shaken awake. It was a reflex and nothing more; his mind was still clearly elsewhere as rubbed at his eyes and jostled his thick-rimmed glasses. He stared down at the rumpled sheets with difficulty. "That sounds … good."

"Are you alright?" the Detective asked him, unable to help himself. It was a question too large for their complicated circumstances, but worry tugged at him at the sight of the zombie sitting so still again. Hanna had to gather his thoughts and pluck absently at his arm stitches before speaking.

"It's just … those two guys. Cas and Finas. They acted like we were bros or something, but…" Hanna trailed off. He steepled his fingers in front of his closed mouth then turned his piercing blue eyes on his partner, both expression and glow purely confused. "It's a lot to assume someone's been bumped off, but wouldn't you at least start getting weirded out if you hadn't heard from them in a year?"

"Maybe your job took you a lot of places," the Detective offered, unable to keep the doubt from his voice even as he tried to banish the despondent expression from the zombie's face. "People in your line of work seem like they would be used to long silences. Maybe it's safer that way. Not to ask."

Hanna shrugged, but it was stunted and heavy and his expression didn't lighten.

"It's just bothering me. What it means, I mean," he said before his partner could pad their silence with more wilting assurances. The Detective frowned and Hanna sighed, voice softening to a scratchy monotone. "I died, but no one seems to care. I don't even have a tombstone. My apartment got gutted and passed to someone else. I guess I can thank Mrs. Blaney for saving my stuff, but … it's like I got scraped clean off the map. There's just nothing left. I keep expecting someone to call me up and ask for their five bucks back, but it never happens."

The strained, plaintive expression on his face told of his want for a petty call over late fees, maybe a library book that was a year overdue. Just to hear his name in someone else's voice. Just to prove he had belonged at one time in this life, even if it was as little as his name in a roster.

The Detective's heart clenched in wretched understanding, hanging suspended by a single thread in the void of his chest just as he sat suspended in the void of his own disappearance.

"Yeah, I died, but it's like nothing happened because of it. No one even missed me. Was I really that alone?"

The zombie's too-soft question stuck in the older man's throat and stung him horribly. His gut instinct was to refute that idea as passionately as he was able; he barely stopped himself from physically taking Hanna and shaking him. Hanna had had friends. Hanna was too bright, too vital, not to draw people to him like a beacon — and he was absolutely certain that Hanna left a gaping hole where he had been ripped from life. They just hadn't found it yet. But the lump in his throat and Hanna's dead expression wouldn't allow for those words. The zombie couldn't listen to anyone else's gut feelings but his own at this point so his partner cleared his throat and made himself useful some other way.

"Your journals haven't given you any ideas?" he asked, voice rough.

"I keep mentioning this guy named Doc. The only thing I can really figure out about him is that he was good at stitching up flesh-wounds, and he got mad all the time. And probably had some kind of drug problem." The zombie shrugged, leaning on his hand again. The bedroom shadows collected in the creases underneath his glowing eyes and his expression was suddenly tired in a way that spoke of twelve months spent under black pressing dirt. Alone. "That's it. I mean, my journals have stuff. I talked about people sometimes. I had friends, and I bet they're out there, but now, even if I did meet them …"

"It's hard to say whether you would care about them," the Detective filled in quietly. A clear, mournful jolt went through the older man when Hanna looked up, expression wounded but strangely grateful to find understanding in someone else. He didn't have to look very far.

The same notion had been haunting him recently. The episode with the hunters worsened it. Just like Hanna didn't seem to connect in the slightest to the first people they had found from his old life, hearing about his possible kidnapping had given him nothing more than an awkward dislocated feeling that made the older man realize he had no connection to the life he had before. He kept wanting some feeling, even a horrible one, to strike him as undeniable and distinctly _real_ in a way that his current zombie-sitting and daily workload and four a.m. strolls were not. He wanted a promise that he could _return_, but he had no pain of the memory of who he may have lost, only a dogged want to affirm that there were indeed people if just so he could populate his deserted mental landscape with anchors. Even now, though he hadn't abandoned it, he couldn't expect what mattered to him back then to matter to him now. That was a scary feeling.

What if he had had a wife? A child? A sister, a brother? Could he pass them on the street, brush past a restaurant where they were waiting to order, and not even know what he had left behind; not even be aware of the lives he had destroyed by his absence as he walked on, ignorant of regret or shame or guilt or a real want to return to them? Maybe it was easier to forget than to be forgotten and that idea haunted him worse than dreams of being buried.

"As you said, you had friends. All we can do is keep looking," the Detective heard himself say, unable to begin to voice the gap inside of himself as he looked at his small partner. "And hope that the next person we find will be worth knowing."

Hanna just shook his head like he hadn't quite heard. To him, he was still an isolated incident. A hanging drop of water, brought to life by random circumstances and waiting to fall back into obscurity. The Detective studied him sadly, compelled to say anything to reassure the small zombie that he had left behind something worthwhile and he could find something similar to it if not the real thing. He needed some kind of anchor.

The older man groped for no more than a moment before he shut his eyes, suddenly remembering something and deciding on it in the same moment. It was something he probably should have dealt with a while ago, if he expected Hanna to continue to be completely honest with him. That made now a good time to discuss it while they were already traversing delicate subjects.

"There's actually something I've been waiting to tell you. Or someone. I tried to get in contact with him before I told you anything, but I didn't expect it to go on this long. You need to know that he's out there."

Hanna looked up at him, a flicker of hope passing behind his thick glasses. The Detective took a deep breath, scrubbing at the base of his hair.

"You have a friend. He's a … vampire. He had been looking for you for a while and is fully aware that you died. He's actually been harassing Conrad about you, and I hope to put a stop to that sometime soon, but … one thing at a time."

The Detective's overwhelmed expression melted considerably to see Hanna perk up, his interest finally piqued by the strange drama. The zombie considered it, then squinted to the side.

"Wait a minute. I have a vampire BFF… and he's been messing with Conrad?" he asked, folding his knees to his chest and arching a brow. He imagined it for a moment, then shook his head with a confident expression. "I don't think you have to worry about it. Conrad's a secret badass. He just doesn't know it yet. Just watch, someone just has to get spaghetti sauce on his favorite white shoes or something and he'll go hulk."

Smiling a little, the Detective agreed and told him everything he knew about the vampire, pointedly not elaborating on how terrifying the creature was. It was a little difficult when retelling the instance in which the vampire shoved him against an alley wall and threatened him with grotesque bodily harm, but he managed. As Hanna absorbed the information with wide eyes, it finally became real to the older man and unfolded in his mind as a legitimate option.

The first encounter in the alleyway could have been anything — a ploy, an incident of insanity — but Conrad's report verified the connection. Somewhere in Hanna's past there lurked a very dirty, very angry vampire, which was strange, considering the fact the zombie was also friends with two men who hunted vampires for a living. It must have made for complicated guest-lists at Christmas parties. Still, provided they could get hold of him, he could be an invaluable resource for finding out what Hanna was doing before he disappeared.

What happened after and up till the point of his death was another story entirely.

"Man, he sounds a little crazy. Do I have some nutso-attracting pheromone or is it just me?" Hanna demanded when his partner finished, palming his face with a little groan. When he surfaced, his eyes were brighter, his expression a little more collected. He was thinking forward again. "Still, that's … cool. Someone was looking for me: that's good, right? Someone almost shivving you for partnering up with me, not so cool. But if he's freaked out about me, why doesn't he just talk to Conrad and get our number?"

"Conrad actually said that was confusing him as well. We can't say for sure until we speak with him."

"Man, everything's like that. We have a lot of info, but nothing to do with it. No connecting strings," Hanna muttered crossly, then shrugged. "We should ask Conrad about it and see if we can meet up, but until then … I don't know. No matter who we can connect to it, it's all a big blank spot. Except that I was looking for you, we just don't know anything about what happened to me before I died."

"How it happened would be a good start," the Detective said solemnly, hands on his knees. Hanna looked up from his knitted fingers and found his partner's dark eyes waiting for him, serious and a bit sad, but mostly determined.

They couldn't go any further until they went to Conrad for an examination. It was the one option they had that wasn't alarming or dangerous. Physically, at least.

The physical change in the zombie was almost shocking. Hanna's eyes fell to the rumpled sheets, tiny shoulders crumpling inwards like all the magic had been siphoned out of him. He ducked around his hollowed chest, small and skinny and brittle.

"I know. I know," Hanna squeezed out, shifting uncomfortably and rubbing at his stitched-up neck. "It's just …"

"Not something you want to do. I know." The Detective put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm not happy about it either, but there are some questions we can't avoid. Maybe if we figure out how you died, we can start to think about why you were looking for me. I'll be there with you. Ask Conrad to make it quick. Nothing will happen."

Even as he knew it had to be a safe procedure for someone without a pulse, the danger was so much more about the young man underneath the stitches. The older man still felt like he was making achingly empty assurances. Hanna's hurt expression didn't brighten and it seemed like the longer he frowned, the bigger the imprint would be on his face and his motionless heart. They sat there for a moment in the dark they shared, absorbing the idea and its risks, before Hanna abruptly rose to his knees.

"You need to get to sleep."

The Detective frowned, then saw the hyper-blue flare from his undead partner's eyes and the tenseness in his tiny frame and realized the zombie was done talking about this for the time being. Meaning, he needed to get away and think. The nervous, wary expression looked wrenchingly unnatural on Hanna's face, but he had implicitly agreed that the visit to Conrad needed to happen, and that was enough. They would deal with anything else tomorrow night.

The older man nodded, tiredness rushing into the place the stressful conversation had occupied. He rubbed at his face as the zombie clambered off the bed in unusual silence, then closed his eyes and lay back. It felt like far too much had been packed into just one dark hour of talking.

He turned to his side and spent a few minutes settling into the dark of his lids, which he had to tell himself were safe. He was almost asleep (it took about five minutes with his long day catching up to him and weighing him into the sheets), and then he heard the slide of shoes across the floor and stiffened. He opened his eyes. From the shy glow of blue in the dark, he realized Hanna hadn't gone beyond to the living room like usual, but was sitting at his doorway, skinny legs propped up at odd angles with an old peeling tome on his lap.

"Hanna?" he asked, propping himself on his elbow and giving a bleary, questioning stare to the door. Hanna looked down to mark his place in the book, then gave a cheery wave of his hand.

"In case you have another nightmare. I'll wake you up." He gave a smile that didn't quite reach his blue eyes, then abandoned it in favor of an honest expression that settled so much better with the gravity in the room and the smell of staling fear-sweat. "And don't worry, I didn't really want to go walking. I'll do it some other night. Tuesday nights are creepy anyways. I'm okay here. And I'll make you pancakes in the morning, since we have that new pan. Just go to sleep. You have work. Go on."

Hanna's positive but serious face was somehow immensely comforting to him. The gravity and care he knew the dead young man had was still so new to him, but he felt it completely and deeply. He had to remind himself that Hanna himself was still a mystery, that he had not always been this way, but he was so bright and sincere and _Hanna_ that just the quirk of his mouth thoroughly erased the drifting creature he had been before. Both of them had escaped amnesia with the most important parts of themselves, the working parts that would lead them towards their destination. In so many ways, they were fortunate in the way that lasted.

The Detective's smile was thanks enough for his partner, and he went back to sleep feeling distinctly safe: reminded that the skin around the void was still warm and he had someone to watch out for him in the dark, whether it was outside or inside.


	18. Misery's Design

A/N: Neurrrrghhhh. Hannaaaaaaa.

I'mma be a lamefag now and say that the title for this was stolen from the lyrics to Exquisite Corpse, a song from the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Which, if you have an ounce of appreciation for quality (and you're reading this fic, aren't you? :P NYUCKNYUCK), you seriously need to get your butt up and go see. Now. NOWWWWWdoit.

I've got it all sewn up

a hardened razor-cut

scar-map across my body

and you can trace the lines

through misery's design

that map across my body

a collage

I'm all sewn up

a montage

I'm all sewn up

_Warnings: language, gruesome themes/violence_

* * *

Misery's Design

* * *

The morgue was cold, but by no means cold enough for a scarf, which really failed to explain why Conrad was currently wearing one bundled around his throat and tucked into his scrubs like an incredibly lame ascot.

The explanation lay beneath the fat, blue, stripy (and above-all, _concealing_) length of yarn. The coroner had looked in the mirror that morning while shaving and realized he was actually starting to have some mottled discoloration just under his jaw, where Luce kept biting into him. No matter how the vampire slicked it up with his magical healing spit, he had _scars_, albeit very tiny ones. He was going to have to tell the bastard to switch sides or something, which struck him as unbearably domestic in some incredibly fucked-up way. Like they were negotiating who slept on what side of the bed or who washed or dried the dishes or who was on top.

Either that or all the blood-loss was getting to his brain, he thought grimly, trying to match a selection of tire-tread patterns to the squelchy purple bruising on a new victim's powdery white arm. Maybe it was making him hallucinate endearments that weren't there. Especially troubling was the realization that he was beginning to abide Luce as something more than a freak accident that sometimes happened at three a.m.

"Hey Doc!"

Brows high, Conrad turned around at the sound of his morgue door being shoved open. He looked over just in time to catch a whorl of red hair before Hanna the zombie hit the floor with an audible thump, followed by a muffled _oof_. Conrad's frown was instant: he didn't know anyone who called him _Doc_ and the voice was familiar, yet not. It was too loud for Hanna and it certainly hadn't come from the Detective, who was standing in the doorway and staring at the floor with a plainly baffled look on his handsome face.

The coroner stared, sheet of printed tire-patterns tucked close to his chest, then actually _recoiled_ as the tiny zombie hopped back up again the next minute, normally blank face pinched at the edges with a giant, beaming grin.

"Sorry, tripped!" he announced cheerily, like he was all too happy to have his alone time with the floor. Then Hanna tugged his clothes straight with easy, mobile, amazingly _fast_ flicks of his green fingers, and Conrad's mouth _fell the fuck open_.

He was moving. He was smiling. He was _fast_ and articulate and why was there so much _noise_ coming out of him? Hanna straightened and puffed his chest out in front of the coroner, as if showing off his new ensemble of a sweater and a button-down shirt, which actually made him look like a twenty-something-year-old guy and not a lost little dead boy and what the holy hell, was Hanna _preening_?

"Cool scarf!" the zombie complimented him out of nowhere, blinking his doey blue headlight eyes. "Did you make it? You look like the kinda guy who knits or something, do you knit? Or maybe crochet, I don't know the difference but I think it has something to do with hooks versus needles or something, I don't even know but that is a really awesome scarf and it looks really warm, is it warm?"

Conrad did, in fact, knit on the odd occasion, and knew that crocheting was done with hooks, and yes, the scarf _was_ warm, but he was too wrapped up in staring at Hanna, the _babbling zombie_, to say all of these useless things. Mostly, he was just wondering what the holy hell had gone on at the witchdoctor's place and if zombies could snort crack. Hanna's bony, dry little body was downright bursting with pent-up energy, the mooniness of his glowing eyes diminished by half and undercut further by his wide, violently expressive mouth.

It was like seeing a slow, rasping paper doll with only three joints to its name metamorphose into a rip-roaring, bouncing, noisy 3D model overnight, and it plainly spooked the fuck out of him.

"Woah," Conrad breathed out, the word plinking like a raindrop in the bucket of his shock as Hanna abandoned their one-sided conversation and started wandering to the side of the room, humming something loudly. Something that sounded like … Queen.

Queen? The coroner frowned sharply. Someone else he knew loved Queen, didn't they?

The image of Luce and Hanna crouched by a wall, crooning Lover Boy together, hit Conrad like a sledgehammer and made him almost slap his forehead to keep his world from falling apart.

"I think _woah_ just about sums it up," the Detective said mildly, traces of awe still evident in the reverent way he watched the zombie _skip_ along the side of the room, slapping his green hands along the handles to the body-trays.

"Jesus. What … _happened_?" Conrad gulped out, trying not to make it sound like it was something disturbing and regrettable.

"The sea-witch we saw—"

"Witch-doctor?" he half-corrected the older man, frowning.

"He's minoring in voodoo," the Detective said with a faintly clueless smile, shaking his head when Conrad gaped at him. He waved his hand. "Doesn't matter. He set up a spell and managed to break the thing that was locking up Hanna's personality."

"Wait. There was a thing inside of him? Someone put something in him, just to keep him …?"

_Dead_, Conrad wanted to say, because even though the zombie's pulse hadn't magically returned, the contrast between _that_ Hanna and _this_ Hanna was like putting dirt and fireworks side-by-side. The Detective frowned like he hadn't quite thought about the reasoning behind the troubling seal, then inclined his head.

"I don't know why, but … that's the only explanation. Veser didn't have much more for us, and, to be honest, we weren't prepared to absorb it." His expression faltered, like there was something that had gone on with the sea-witch's spell that he wasn't comfortable speaking about. After a little bit of staring at his undead partner, the older man reduced the hesitation on his face into a simple-yet-ominous, "We're just grateful the spell worked. For a moment, I wasn't sure that it was going to."

Conrad blinked and tried to absorb the new information. Though he wasn't willing to drag the Detective into his own prickly guesswork, Conrad had to wonder who the hell raised a zombie then put a spell on him to keep him a pale shadow of his former self. Or maybe it had happened before he died? Anyone's guess, at this point. He didn't like unanswered questions, and he didn't even want to think about how distraught he'd be if it were _his_ zombie that had so many unanswered questions looming around his tiny shoulders, even if it didn't seem to bother Hanna.

Hanna skittered around the chilly chrome-accented morgue as the two men watched, inspecting scalpels and trays and saws with the bustling interest of a ferret. At last, the zombie finally puttered to a halt in front of Conrad's current patient (the one with the tire-treads that still needed matching to find out whether he was murdered by a Honda or a Kawasaki, and therefore his cousin or his coworker) and wrinkled his pointy green nose.

"I never really noticed before, but your job is super-skeevy, Connie. And creepy."

"Says the zombie with the stitches across his neck," Conrad intoned archly, putting the tire-track sheets down and raising a brow at the _name_ even as he wondered what the hell skeevy meant.

Why did everyone insist on torturing him with that feminization? Still, Hanna was here, which meant he was alive (er, dead) and in one piece, which was just great. He wasn't willing to admit it, but he'd been legitimately worried. It also meant he could satisfy his vampire problem quickly next time Luce came sniffing around. Maybe even get a … bonus for bringing such good news?

… He wasn't using information about Hanna as collateral to get Luce into his pants. _Wasn't_.

Okay, maybe a little. Still, this was great. And maybe if he reported that Hanna had gotten some of his memories back, too, he could get Luce's phone number or address or something … Where the hell did he live, anyways? Was it a simple case of 'home is where the coffin is' or was some poor landlord honestly forced to put up with Luce and his filth?

"Actually, that's what we were … hoping you would help us with."

Conrad looked up from his thoughts, startled by the Detective's abruptly subdued tone. The man's dark eyes matched his voice and, as the coroner watched, one hand came up to haltingly rub at his wrist. Conrad searched his brain for what he had said last and emerged with a tight frown.

"He's busted another stitch? Already? Christ, can't you take a minute to celebrate by _not_ sniffing out demons and terrifying shit?" Conrad asked, trying not to be annoyed and a little confused. Maybe it was the way he was bouncing around, but Hanna had never looked so _intact_ and the Detective corroborated his suspicions by shaking his head.

"No. No loose stitches. But … Conrad, you're a coroner, right?"

The question seemed excruciatingly dumb for a man as smart as he knew the Detective was. Turning slightly from Conrad's stymied _well, yeah_ stare, the older man cleared his throat and clarified, "What I mean is, you can … find out how people died. If you have a body."

"Yeah. Determining cause of death is pretty much what I do with all my Saturday ni — wait, this is for Hanna?" Conrad asked uncertainly, like the concept had never occurred to him. That made three of them. He turned to the tiny zombie with his hands out. "But I thought everything was alright, and you got your … self back, and everything?"

"His personality, not his memories. The sea-witch, Veser … he told us that Hanna still has his memories. They're just locked away," the Detective explained to him soberly. He crossed his thin, muscular arms and leaned against the nearest empty table. "Then we found some people who knew him before he died. A pair of vampire-hunters."

Christ. Why did Conrad's skin tighten compulsively at the mention of vampire-hunters? From the look on the Detective's face, they hadn't exactly endeared themselves to the investigators, either.

"They said … I don't even know if we can trust them, but they implied that Hanna was actually looking for me before he died."

"What, really?" Conrad exclaimed, brow knitting as he tried to make sense of that. Cosmic sense. "That's …"

Insane? Unlikely? Perfect? Suspicious? _Dangerous_? The Detective's complex, wary expression and dark almond eyes seemed to qualify and accept all of those definitions. When he spoke up again, his deep voice was tinted with hesitance like it had been the whole night — and with what he said next, Conrad knew why.

"We think … or, at least, I think that if you can tell us how that happened, it might jog something. It might help us get a clue as to what Hanna was doing before he died, and how that might connect to me. It's the only concrete fact we have to focus on."

Conrad's mouth fell open, unease suddenly gnawing at his skin. To his relief and despair, the Detective mirrored it. Every bit of it. He didn't want to do this, but he knew he had to.

After a minute of staring at the two partners, Conrad swallowed with difficulty, throat suddenly dry.

"You really want me to inspect Hanna? For … why? I mean, he's been in the ground so long, I can only tell you … a little bit of stuff. Like, maybe what kind of weapon did it. Where he was hit, and things like that."

That was the crux of it and it sounded damn awful coming out. It sounded, really, like a painful, completely unnecessary dredging-up of horrible not-memories, creating trauma and pain where there hadn't been any before. Unnecessary salt in a nebulous wound that would not only become corporeal but starting bleeding heavily as fuck. 'Morbid' didn't even begin to cover it.

They actually wanted to know how Hanna had died, blow by blow. Literally.

Conrad looked helplessly at the older man and then at the zombie, who was hiding a little in his baggy sweater, then finally blurted out what they seemed to be waiting for.

"I mean, I can't tell you who did it."

"I know that," the Detective said somberly, and his steady, sad gaze proved it. They were willing to face up to the pain without a definitive answer as to how it happened. Christ.

Conrad bit his lip and looked up at the tall man, then looked down at Hanna, who matched his gaze with a steely, if fearful, look. At last, Conrad let his chin fall to his chest and reached up to undo the striped scarf around his neck, unable to stand its close cling anymore. Without thinking, he sullenly handed it to Hanna, whose blue eyes flared in undeniable appreciation.

Conrad motioned to the free table, glancing up at the video camera and then at the door.

"Come on. Hop up."

Hanna did so, clutching the blue-and-white striped scarf in his lap like a safety blanket. As he sat, the movement ebbed from his once-bouncy frame and left him disturbingly like the bony shadow Conrad had first met. The only sign of life was his wan, sickly smile, proffered as a sort of sad assurance at the touch of the Detective's hand on his shoulder.

"I'm going to need you to take off your shirt, Hanna," Conrad said hesitantly, motioning to his own. The disturbingly _doctor_-like phrase hit him right below the sternum, doubling his nerves and looming nausea. God, he was no doctor. "You know … to see."

He could do without the pants. Not much vital happened below the waist, unless it involved arteries. Hanna looked over at his partner for a moment, every bony green limb weighed with reluctance, before reaching down and pulling his sweater over his head, then unbuttoning his shirt.

Conrad tried not to stare at the ravaged spans of dead skin, his caving green stomach and stitched-over collarbone, then realized it was what he was there to do.

He couldn't even count the stitches. There were too many of them. Then there was the fact that the green canvas of Hanna's skin was peppered with odd drawings, spanning the visible wrinkle of his ribs and the dip of his back. Conrad forced himself to walk slowly around the table, viewing the hunched dead boy from all sides until he could make an accurate damage assessment.

One thick, grisly laceration plowed up the front of his emaciated chest, sprouting off to either side at the top. Standard Y-incision. There were seven lines of stitches in his back. Stab-wounds, most likely, judging from the clean entry. Both of his arms had been re-attached at one point in time, now held in place by thick black twine. A line of stitches trailed across his slender throat, right beneath his barely-there Adam's Apple. Then, with a prickle of terror, the coroner realized that was all the looking he could do with Hanna in his current state.

Conrad closed his eyes, breathed in, and reached for a clean scalpel.

Hands shaking, he carefully pulled apart the black stitches on his back with the very tip of the cold blade. He occasionally glanced up with a _did I hurt you_ look, which Hanna countered with such fierce, clipped head-shakes the first few times that Conrad quit asking, because the very question seemed to upset him.

Conrad moved around Hanna silently, peering into cuts as the Detective watched with a stony expression. He remained wordless, but the coroner's movements became slower and slower and the blood visibly drained from his face as his gloved hands, just barely starting to shake, traced down Hanna's spine.

As if to mirror him, the zombie's face grew blanker and blanker. The old ceaseless shine of his blue eyes adopted a distinctly frightened intensity as Conrad's hands carefully probed him, sliding into slits in his dry skin and lingering for undue amounts of time on the strings of stitches encircling his arms. Hanna tilted his head aside as the coroner inspected the stitching across his throat, staying perfectly still as if afraid to move and reveal something worse.

At last, eyes wide, Conrad reached up and pressed his fingers gently to either side of Hanna's neck.

A muffled, dry _click_ sounded in the silent room, then Conrad's hands were suddenly off of Hanna's neck and pressed against his mouth as he stumbled to the sink. He threw himself over it with a muted groan, elbows sticking out, and they heard fluid slap against chrome. Suddenly, the dangerous cold he had felt seeping into Conrad was in the Detective, too, flooding the hollowed-out space underneath his twisted chest and filling him with something close to blind terror.

He was caught between going to the man twisted over the sink and staying with Hanna, but Conrad coughed out the last of his spit and carefully, numbly wiped his mouth. He turned to look over his shoulder, eyes wide and stricken behind his cockeyed glasses.

"You weren't just killed, Hanna," he whispered, voice thick with nausea and horror. "You were mutilated."


	19. One Thousand

A/N: CRAAAAAAAANES with a heaping burning side of adorableness! Finally. UGH. I know, I need to make up for that utter kidney-slash of a last chapter.

Hehe, I just love playing with the Detective's uncontrollable hotness. That man needs to walk around in a full body suit so he can stop stirring up so many hormones in the female populace. He's contributing to global warming. Or something.

Just a warning, I'm going on hiatus due to school and many, many busy things. No more weekly updates, at least until I get my crap sorted out. But hey, look! There's a contest at my deviantart account, go check!

_Warnings: Sad Zombies, Amazing Adorableness without a hint of Language_

* * *

One Thousand

* * *

The click of the apartment door echoed into a dark landscape suddenly both alien and empty, constructed of nothing but small, cracked hiding places.

The Detective reached for the light-switch in an effort to banish the feeling, but the blaze of their single bulb didn't lighten the zombie's mechanical walk into the hallway. Hanna had been slow and silent all the way back to the house and, when they arrived, he sank into his journal piles but stared unseeingly at the pages. The older man gave him his space but couldn't bear the quiet (or the slow, methodical shuf of unread pages) for long. He barely managed to conquer his own lurking guilt long enough to catch his partner at the kitchen table before he went to sleep.

"What do you want to do?"

It seemed the most straightforward thing he could ask. He wanted to do whatever Hanna wanted to, but most of all he wanted Hanna to _want_ to do something. It suddenly seemed a horribly real possibility that this quietness would take permanent root in the zombie's dry body and web over his mouth and busy fingers. With as slow as his steps were, as limp as his neck was, the Detective couldn't see anything but decay.

Hanna shook his head, sinking down to the patchy surface of the old kitchen table and burying his nose into his arms. Conrad's thick striped scarf was knotted around his thin neck.

"There isn't much we can do. I have my memories but I can't get to them. We know I was looking for you, and I went out really … really badly." He shrugged, just a tiny jolt of his shoulders. "That's it. All we can do is wait and keep looking into things. Do our job. We've done all we can with what we know."

Even though he knew Hanna was so much more mature than he seemed, the weight of his rationale and his monotone voice put a painful pressure on his partner's chest, as did the diffused glow of his blank eyes. He seemed sapped even by the small effort of speaking. The Detective nodded regardless and, when it became obvious that he had done all he could with what _he_ knew (and found it a hopeless, angry place of closed doors and distances uncrossed), he went to bed and left Hanna to his thoughts.

Hanna's mood worsened over the next night. It would have been bad on anyone, a visible crumpling, but it was also too much of a return to the old Hanna. There were times when the blankness of the boy's expression sent a chill down the Detective's spine. The sight made him want to shake the young zombie, even if an uncertain _Hanna?_ usually did the trick of coaxing his partner's mouth into a smile, no matter how forced. Half of his slack face was hidden by the scarf constantly bundled at his throat, insulating his stitches from prying eyes with warmth he couldn't feel or use.

He went to work the next day consumed with the thought of what he could do to … he would say 'cheer Hanna up', but it seemed too flippant a phrase for what he was dealing with. Distract him, more accurately. Give him back motivation. It seemed very, very important that he do this. Otherwise Hanna might lose momentum, start weighing himself into the ground again; or, worse, start coming apart at the seams on the inside. Conrad's instruments could only reach so far.

The ultimatum lurked in the back of his mind all day, worrying him through his attempts to think of _something_ Hanna liked. He wanted something stronger than the passive act of watching a movie, something _compelling_. At the same time, it felt like he didn't know the zombie well enough to say what that could be and that doubled feeling of grim hopelessness followed him into the coffee room an hour before his shift was over. It was going on seven, almost closing hours for the day-shift, and there was a small circle of employees lumped around the soda machines.

The Detective trudged in silently like he usually did, mind heavy with thoughts of his partner alone at the apartment. Was Hanna huddled in a corner, looking desperately through his books for some kind of memory-retrieving rune? Or, worse, was he _not_ looking? Mouth thin, he stood aside and waited until the coffee counter cleared somewhat, then stepped in. The conversation of the small gaggle next to him culminated on a low note, with a refused offer by the sound of it. With a lot of _no, no that's okay_, the employees scattered, leaving one young woman looking after them with a disappointed expression.

She was an intern, maybe, but certainly someone he didn't know. She was pale and pretty in a curvy sort of way; a black and green hoodie-sweater hugged her curves nicely and her hair was that drastic shade of black that looked purple in the right light. While he poured himself a cup of hot black sooty coffee, she turned around.

"I don't suppose you would be interested?" she said tiredly, holding up a sheet of paper.

He looked over from the coffee pot, not noticing how at least four women's heads snapped the opposite direction. He squinted at the creased piece of paper. It was a jumble of letters and fine print underneath a logo that had obviously suffered from her printer's waning cyan.

"In what?" he asked, reaching for sugar.

"Tickets. For the Moonlighters," she said, waggling the print out with a sigh. "My boyfriend and I were going to go but something came up. I've got the confirmation codes, you just have to cash them in under your name. One hundred for two passes, standing room. I got them at the regular price and I'm selling them for the same, you can even check the digital receipt. I just don't want them to go to waste."

The Moonlighters.

The Detective knew that name. God, but he _knew_ that name. All the other technical information about the concert and the price passed him by, leaving him stalled in the strange valley between recognition and conclusion. The Detective frowned in that supremely attractive, pensive-yet-tortured way he had (Yazmin from accounting bent double in her chair so that she could ogle him while he did it, pressing her hand to her mouth) and tried to think it through as he stirred in his sugar.

He had heard it on the radio, that was for certain. They were a band. A popular modern band that dealt in the alternative rock that was popular these days.

That was it. He frowned. It seemed a lukewarm conclusion to arrive at after such a strong burst of recognition. Then he remembered that Hanna had been fond of the radio before he was unlocked and thereafter was actively obsessed with it. At any point in the night the older man could wake up and hear music, but most importantly, the zombie made that squeaky happy noise whenever _that_ particular band was mentioned. The Detective even dully remembered uncovering some scratched CDs from the piles of Hanna's old belongings, all emblazoned with a truly cheap-looking moon logo. He had pictures of one of the band members, a pretty girl with dark skin and exotic eyes with the loopy initials 'T.I.' Yes, Hanna listened to the Moonlighters religiously, even if he usually shut them off when he came home.

It dawned on him slowly and had a similar lighting effect on his face. Hanna liked this band. A lot.

"How much?" he asked quickly, looking over at his coworker.

"Hundred," she repeated, parting herself from her manicured nails with a little surprise.

Reaching for a chair at the now-empty break table, the Detective dug in his wallet and collected a ten and one fifty and some twenties and, lastly, seven ones and a whole lot of quarters and lamely shoved them over the table at her, throwing her an apologetic smile. She arched a brow and sat down at the table with him, committed to raking it all into her purse.

"Never seen a man so eager to get rid of so much of his wallet," she said appraisingly when she was done, looking at the sheet of paper for a minute before passing it over to the Detective, who took it gratefully.

"It's for a good cause," he said, voice warmed with a little hope. A smile came to him slowly as he looked at the bar code and the block of fine print. Perfect. "A very good cause."

He took a sip of his coffee, and then another, pleased with how the warmth mixed with the fortunate glow under his collarbone. He was busy imagining Hanna's brightened face when the woman's wandering tone pierced his triumphant haze.

"Now, where did you come from?"

The Detective looked up, confused, and then realized the question wasn't directed at him at all. The woman was studying something in her hand, something that looked like an angular bit of white. A folded piece of paper in the shape of a bird. Yes, a paper crane.

"It looks like origami. A paper crane," he tried, not really knowing much more than that or why it was on the table.

"I saw one of Rebecca's kids in here earlier, folding things. I guess this one got left behind. You know, there's this cute myth about these little guys …" The Detective looked over at her wordlessly, a little interested. She shrugged, smiling some as she turned it over in her hand. "They say that if you make a thousand of them, you get a wish granted."

"One thousand? Seems like a lot of effort," he said vaguely, curious enough to hold his hand out for it. She obliged and pulled at certain parts of the tiny bird; his eyes widened a bit as she made it flap right into his hand. Her little smile faded.

"Some wishes are worth a lot of effort, I guess," she said solemnly.

He would have had to agree, and, beneath the yammer of his thoughts, a small idea began to take root. Before he could think too deeply on it, he caught sight of the confirmation print-out and that awful moon logo and was buzzed with a sense of opportunity again. What luck. And it was in two weeks. Soon enough to revive Hanna and far enough away to let him build up some sense of excitement. Remember what it was to live.

He sat back and looked excitedly at the promise of tickets. The creased print out wouldn't be nearly as dramatic as presenting the actual ticket-stubs, and he regretted the loss of article genuineness that was so common in their modern world, but it would have to do. Hanna would know what they meant. The young lady looked at his elated expression and snorted lightly, making him look up from his memorization of the band logo.

"Your girlfriend is going to be one happy lady."

"Oh, I don't — it's not … just for a friend," he irked out somewhat airlessly, waving the paper in a _thank you_ before folding it up and tucking it into his pocket.

"Well, whoever. I'm lucky I caught you. Some things like this are just meant to happen, I guess. Enjoy."

On her way out, she looked back and smiled and, for a split second, the Detective thought he saw two delicate white points pressing into her red bottom lip.

* * *

When he got home, Hanna was slumped on the floor in a corner, hands empty.

The older man's heart tensed at the sight even as he turned away quickly, pretending like he hadn't seen it, and called his partner to the table. He could feel the cold, paralyzing staleness of his apartment eating at his skin but it couldn't touch his determination. No one could thrive here with this feeling all around, not even the undead. He would fix this.

Scarf trailing listlessly, the zombie trudged in and sat down at the table, looking upset to be in the company of people again. He seemed the type to be left alone when angry or upset, if just because he thought he was burdening other people with his emotions … or had long become accustomed to the assumption they just wouldn't understand. Once Hanna was seated and staring at the clock on the wall resentfully, the Detective reached into his bag and produced his masterpiece of the afternoon. It sat in his palm, resplendent in yellow memo paper and listing considerably to the side.

"Do you know what this is?"

"A paper crane?" Hanna asked, blinking slowly in a way that said his interest was not at all hooked. His partner nodded, pulling out their sole remaining (mismatched) chair and seating himself. He looked intently at the tiny origami bird in an effort to make Hanna do the same, keeping his voice low and conversational.

"A woman at work today told me about them … There's a myth that says that once you make a thousand, you get a wish granted."

After she left, he had spent the next thirty minutes unfolding and refolding the lost paper crane until he had the process memorized. He was still a little sloppy but he had managed to fold one of his own out of a piece of memo paper and now presented it to the small zombie. Hanna plucked the new crane out of his fingers and set it in front of himself, studying its pointy form. Then, tongue poking out of his mouth and pointy nose screwing up slightly, he reached for a loose piece of notebook paper. Within seconds his wrists were flexing and his fingers were making papery hisses as he folded things flat and up and down and sideways with an altogether amazing speed and seamlessness.

When he was done, a perky blue-striped paper crane sat in front of him, far better than his partner's lopsided one.

"Like this?"

"I think you've done that before," the Detective said with stunned pleasure, smiling at his tiny partner. Like sunlight reflected and caught by the moon, Hanna's smile started slow and grew to a shy grin. He put one hand to his mouth as if to be certain it was there, cracking the empty sullenness that had coated his skin like grime over the past two days.

"I think I have, too," he said with some surprise, like it meant so much more than that, and it did. He was turning the crane over in his hands when the Detective leaned in, watching it.

"You'll get yourself back, Hanna," he said softly, reaching out and touching the crane's tiny bowed head. He could see the halo of Hanna's blue eyes beyond it, glowing. "Between the two of us, we'll either make a thousand of these or find someone who can give you what you want. You aren't going to lose yourself if you take a break from looking. We have time."

Hand abruptly tightening on the crane, Hanna looked up at the older man with true gratefulness and 'Socrates' smiled back, letting the silence speak for them. The fact that he was putting Hanna before his own goals didn't even matter to him; he was beginning to believe that, even if his life had started at thirty, he still had a lot farther to go. He wasn't going to obsess about the life he'd forgotten at the cost of losing the one he had now, with Hanna. He was with the zombie for a reason. He had to help him, and not just because their pasts were knotted together.

He looked up when Hanna suddenly snorted, flopping sideways onto the table with wonderful quickness and knocking his glasses askew.

"Man, we're a pair, aren't we? I mean, it would be messed-up enough if _one_ of us didn't have our memories, but both of us? Have you ever thought about how stupid that is?" he asked, pushing his glasses back into place and tugging the scarf from around his neck. Hanna smiled faintly at the paper crane still sitting in his palm then put his cheek on his fist, the blue of his eyes dimming a little. "At this point, so much is weird and messed up that I don't even know what I'd wish for."

Simple and obvious though the sentiment was, the Detective heard the unspoken question of direction: Hanna didn't know whether his past or his present was more valuable to him. The most obvious wish was to remember everything and be able to solve their conundrum. It seemed like getting back his memories would be the clearest step towards reclaiming himself, but now there was a confounding option that said this was the new life Hanna never knew he wanted, which lay tangential to the possibility that his old life wasn't as grand as he thought it was. Maybe it had been dangerous. Violent. Bad. Maybe, at this point, the best thing would be to wish for a pulse and use it to keep walking forward. Live in the now until the past came to them of its own accord.

It was amazing, how they were both confronted with the same perilous uncertainties and the same wide forks between then and now — and the older man found it even more amazing that such an awful inconsistency knitted them together in a way no one else could understand.

"With nine hundred and ninety eight more chances to think about it, I don't think the choice will catch you off-guard," the Detective said with some tired humor. Once he had gotten Hanna to smile like he meant it, most of the determined fervor left him and he realized that bed sounded very nice right then. But not yet, obviously. There was still one more smile to go, to set it all in plaster. He tapped the table to catch Hanna's attention.

"Now, you want your real surprise?"

"I have a real surprise?" Hanna asked with a shadow of his old spunk. His blue eyes flashed brighter as he righted himself, suddenly wiggling in his chair like a corgi puppy told to sit.

Chuckling as he reached into his bag, the Detective passed Hanna another paper crane he had already folded. He dotingly corrected a little slump in its wing before dropping it into the dead boy's rune-covered palm. Hanna looked down at it then up at him, one brow inching up above his thick-rimmed glasses. The look said, _Yeah, it was cute the first time_ or something similar and the Detective wanted to laugh a little, seeing that cynical expression on wide-eyed Hanna.

"Unfold it," he said with a nod, smile creeping across his face again. His chest was suddenly lighter, buoyed by a pleased, warm sensation: anticipation. He was lifted upright by the chance to do something for someone, which he realized that he missed more than life, even as he'd never had it in living memory.

"But that means one less crane," Hanna said with a strangely overwhelmed frown.

"We'll refold him afterwards," his partner assured him, amused by the zombie's hesitation. He gestured encouragingly until Hanna carefully picked the small bird apart, teasing it out into a piece of paper creased into a kaleidoscope of diamonds and triangles. He smoothed it out on the table; his partner could see the upside down band logo, chopped up by all the fold-marks. The older man held his breath a bit, hoping he'd made the right decision. Hanna looked and forced his bright eyes over the cramped jargon (purchased at 23:41 UST, redeemable at any outlet for (2) STANDING ROOM ticket(s), cannot be resold) and his hands stilled on the paper, mouth falling open.

The fact that Hanna jumped up from his chair and screamed was a definite indicator he'd made the right leap, even if the paranormal investigator followed it with one of his own that landed the older man with a lap full of zombie and an overturned chair and a bruised head and a reassurance that the _real_ Hanna Falk Cross never did anything half-way, even when it came to inflicting short stints of unconsciousness on his partner.


	20. Sordid History

A/N: MOAR MONT. ALWAYS MOAR. Jeechrist, so much Mont. You don't show up for ten chapters, and then you commandeer 22 pages worth of fic, wth man? You're lucky you're so fine.

Thanks for waiting, guys! I know I've been, like, dead, but I will assure you that this is my current brainchild: wild kelpies couldn't keep me from it (in the long run). Give internet kisses to my fantastic beta RaeHimura, who never lets me down!

_Warnings: language, angst and a little suggestive HETERO-sexuality at the end, and hey, who's that lady? HMMM. No, seriously, guys, have you noticed? Ah, and there's absolutely an adult continuation of this on the way. Which means this comic made me pop my heterocherry. At 21 years of age. Wow. I am prodigally gay._

* * *

Sordid History

* * *

Lamont Toucey, like many of his clientele, lived on the fuzzy hump that delineated late night from early morning.

While 3 a.m. could usually find the supernatural contractor haggling over the price of blood-meal with a jonesing troll, that night was a comforting flat-line of activity. Only the occasional police siren clattered against the thick concrete walls. A beer bottle stood at attention to his right, lukewarm despite the penetrating chill in the bare office. Eyes half-lidded, the contractor heaved his nice loafers off of his desk and popped his back, then set to correcting the mess he'd made tearing through his contacts earlier that evening, looking for a soothsayer on short notice.

Lamont sorted through the scattered papers on his desk, alphabetizing, then frowned slowly as he pulled one green sheet toward him. It was an important document that belonged in the file of a local alchemist, but it had a violent pen scratch on it: one word that took up half the page.

'Cottonballs.'

Lamont sighed through his nose and his chin dropped to his chest, pleasant sleepiness suddenly calcifying into genuine tiredness.

On his way in or out, Worth sometimes left him shopping lists on whatever piece of paper happened to be around at the time. Other times, Lamont was certain the crabby vampire actively searched for the most important piece of paper to destroy with his doctor's scrawl. Face grim, Lamont fished out a duplicate of the document-type and set to copying out every little box in his own rounded script.

For the millionth time and the millionth replacement sheet, Lamont wondered why the hell he let the vampire use his back-alley office as a hidey-hole. Completing the knee-jerk of a rhetorical question for the millionth time, he sighed. Sad as it was, Worth was the closest thing to a best friend he had, and he would likely be renting out his own hidey-hole without him.

He really had been playing it a bit cool to the awkward pedestrian — the one with the sweater-vest and the zombie problem — who came to see him. He and Worth honestly were close, but it was an elbows-and-knees kind of close. Their general regard for each other was hard to see through the gaping crevasse between their personalities, not to mention Worth's endearing habit of verbally abusing and punching anything that had sentimental significance. Lamont abstained from calling it a _friendship_ because the term was too simple … and he wanted to protect the standard, because he didn't think anybody else could have survived a friendship with a beginning like theirs.

The age gap alone was a little moderately terrifying.

"_Um. Uh, scuze me, mister. I think that's my ball."_

"_Heh. Mister."_

_He said it like he hadn't heard anything as funny in years. _

_Lamont's pudgy hand tightened on his baseball bat out of nothing more than nerves as the tall man's pointy shoe scraped against the floor, cementing his swagger into a threatening stance. He tossed the dirty but precious ball up and snatched it out of the air, too quick to see, with a sharp clapping noise. Hard enough to slap the signature of Lamont's favorite baseball player right off, which made his teeth click together in anxiety._

_The man grinned with his front teeth, all jagged and sharp, and looked down at Lamont like he was a particularly squeaky chew toy._

"_I got a ball alright. Dunno if it's yers, though. S'got someone's name onnit er somethin'. Wossyer name, kid?"_

"_Lamont. Touthey."_

Lamont licked his pen and chuckled, remembering that moment when he had doomed himself by _answering_ the creepy-looking man in the fur coat with anything but a bald-faced lie.

His name had come out like that because he had had a gap between his teeth and a mighty lisp because of it. Most would have described him as a grade-A butterball, so it was no wonder his self-confidence (or his common sense) wasn't exactly peaking at that age. Lamont figured that, if his household had been normal and perhaps middle-class, he would have felt the need to call out for an adult after seeing Worth standing there with his ball, threatening grin in place. As it was, he had looked up at that tall, scraggly man with the pointy teeth, whiskey bottle hanging from his clawed hand, and felt an altogether stupendous but manageable fear.

That feeling raged strong before, after, and during the time when the strange man taunted him and then started ranting drunkenly about how kids in his age would have killed him on sight and nine-year-olds were just piles of mush now, mommied until they couldn't even get boners without five different kinds of assistance. Even after Lamont sprinted forward, slammed his bat into the vampire's knee as hard as he could, grabbed his ball and ran until he nearly vomited, he still remembered the vulture-like man and his cynical, pointy smile.

Not that Worth was that hard to remember, with as often as he showed up after that.

Like Lamont told Sweater-Vest-Zombie-Problem, he never went out after dark if he could help it: the likelihood of finding a certain terrifying man in the movie seat next to him, eyeing him like a steak, was a lot higher than his sanity could bear. Still, he found his own way around it. Over the years, Lamont managed to convince himself that Worth either wasn't real (which made him certifiably insane) or was a terrifying yet very human stalker (and thus vulnerable to guns, which prompted Lamont to get a gun before he got a car) until one very specific night that changed their relationship from serial spooking to speaking terms.

As if to spite Lamont's religious subconscious avoidance of the word _vampire_, Worth looked exactly the same fifteen years after the ball incident: only this time, he was pressing his girlfriend against a brick wall with his claws wrapped around her arms and his needle teeth gum-deep in her throat.

_"You sick motherfucker!"_

_The paralyzing fear, vaulting all of his childhood and most of his teenage years to sock him hard in the chest, only lasted as long as it took Rana to breathe in, high and light, atop a crisp splitting noise. As soon as Lamont saw red seeping down her white waitress shirt, he went insane._

_Before he could even think about it, he was all momentum and hard muscle. He charged forward into the dirty space between the movie theater and the hardware store and ripped the skinny man off of his girlfriend, using that same swing to punch him hard in the face. It was his only response: he couldn't think about the fact that a man had bitten Rana, just that it would never happen again, possibly because he was going to fucking kill him._

_The alley was so narrow that the freak's back hit the opposite wall with a jolt and, again, Lamont's fist plowed into him. Teeth locked, Lamont punched him into the brick again and again until the fur-trimmed white coat jerked free from his numb fingers and the man slumped to the wet alley floor, coughing. Then, after a second of clutching his broken face, he started braying haltingly._

_"Aw, love, love, finish me off, I'm—" his torturer slurred, then snorted wetly, blood splattering down the front of his white coat. His mouth, split in a hazy grin, was slathered with red. Lamont could only watch with clenched fists as the man laughed deep in his throat and fumbled across the alley floor on his hands and knees, spidery hand pawing for one of Lamont's pant-legs. _

_"Aw Christ, tha' was good, was so fuckin' good, but I'm beggin' ya. Aw god, love, if ya got an ounce'a pity in ya, gimme a happy ending. I'd ask yer girlfrien bu' she looks a lil out of it an I—" _

_Like a knee-jerk response to 'girlfriend' and the peripheral burn of Rana bleeding behind him, Lamont kicked the man as hard as he could in the side. He went sprawling, coat tangled around him with his hand crushed to his bleeding face, but the second Lamont turned around, cold, wet hands locked around his neck. A thick voice whispered in his ear._

_"Nice ta know you gave that chub a place ta go, Touthey. God knows ya had enough of it. Never seen a fatter kid. You 'member me, kiddo?"_

_"You gave me nightmares until I was thirteen, you bastard," Lamont hissed when he found the words, and if he weren't all fire and hatred he would have been scared shitless by the depth and muffled roar of his own voice. He jerked against the man's skinny body, strong shoulders twisting against not only the physical hold but also the years and years of running from shadows and ducking from men who even slightly resembled the one who had him in a headlock._

_He had to use two hands to count all the times he had run until he just couldn't run anymore, fueled by a glimpse of red eyes and a casual question, like 'You got a light?' at that party in his sophomore year that cemented his reputation as the worst of freaks when he ran screaming from the back of the house and barricaded himself in his friend's car for four hours … all because of this thing who had the nerve to ask if he remembered him._

_"Nightmares, eh? Aw, gotta blame half of it on genetics. S'all m'dad here, high hairline n' all."_

_The vampire started to cackle but choked a little on his own blood or Rana's blood. Lamont's eyes went a matching red at the thought and he struggled even harder, only to be immediately immobilized by the creature's skinny steel arms. His skin was cold, a penetrating cold like porcelain or metal._

_"Christ. Little Monty went and grew up on me," came the tsk from behind his burning ears as the man almost nuzzled him, grinning._

_Lamont could feel him smelling him, taking in his scent, now spiked with testosterone and cologne. Mapping the warm olive expanse of his thick neck and all the tight muscles braided underneath. He went stiff again, teeth clamped hard as he realized that maybe Rana getting bitten wasn't at all the worst thing that could have happened, with as much as this man dug in and sniffed like a predator. _

_Still, he managed to unlock his jaw for one muttered sentence._

_"Wasn't like you weren't there for all the worst parts." _

_"Yeah, 'cos I made a point ta be," he retorted, tone almost admonishing. _

_Heart cramping with concern for his girlfriend, Lamont jerked away and hissed when the man reached up and pinched his ear playfully, wrapping him up tighter like a smirking fur-trimmed boa constrictor. _

_"Y'know, a lotta people come and go, but I always remembered you and yer bat. Even when you were a tyke, ya knew how ta hit. Not many people can do that nowadays. I like ya."_

_"That's great," Lamont growled, ribs fit to snap with the tension across his chest. He clenched his fist, trying to harness that strength into his numb fingers. "Enough not to kill me when I do this?"_

_Throwing his weight against his far foot, Lamont elbowed the man in the gut as hard as he could. The bony body behind him jerked back and Lamont tried to throw him off and run to Rana, but there was already a skinny arm around his neck, yanking him back and locking him in, amazingly strong. Too strong for a human, which was something he had known his whole life but never explicitly accepted._

_"You do that again, I might kiss ya," the not-man grunted in his ear, then gave him a punch in the side and flung his two-hundred pound body away like he was a child again. When Lamont hit the wall and looked up from the solid blow, the skinny man's expression screamed enjoyment. Mad, high, gleeful and just a touch desperate. _

_And for some reason, even though he had a clear path to Rana, Lamont scrambled to his feet and dove straight at him._

_Maybe he wanted to put hands on the demon that had lurked in the alleys of his childhood, or just wanted to beat the shit out of the thing that had almost certainly sucked his girlfriend's blood. Either way, they crashed together and fought, punching and thrashing wordlessly until the world narrowed to bricks and fists and bursts of blackness. Lamont didn't like pain, he never had, but even his brainstem knew this was necessary. The pain of the confrontation bled him of all the cumulative apprehension that had infected his life from age nine, welling like pus under his skin and slowing his movements by clotting in his joints. The switch from flight to fight burned him clean, cauterized the portion of his brainstem that had been so lovingly crafted for the vampire and all of his midnight spookings._

_Had he known anything about vampires at the time, Lamont would have known that Worth could have snapped his neck with a jerk of his wrist. Whether or not that would have kept him from fighting the vampire was uncertain, but, even as consumed with vengeance as he was, he got the idea that the fight was lasting far longer than it should have about the time Worth sent him to the ground with a sharp, dirty kick at his knees, skinny chest heaving and splattered with clammy blood. _

_On the ground, Lamont tried to wrangle parts of himself together — the cold concrete and the gravel biting into his palms, the sharp ache where he was certain one of his kidneys was bruised, the ringing in his ears and the blood on his mouth — and looked up just in time to see Worth descend in a rush of blood-stained white, suddenly all predator teeth and red eyes._

_"Ya don't really love 'er, yannoe," the vampire stated conversationally, as vampire he became with the red on his mouth and in his eyes and the wicked curve of his incisors. Any fear that Lamont felt was immediately swept away by the confident look on his face._

_"The hell?" he choked out, even as he caught a glimpse of Rana's dark skin beyond the vampire's leg and realized he hadn't thought of her in at least three minutes. At all. The thought scalded his mind and Worth's next drawl rubbed salt in it._

_"If y'loved her, you would'a taken 'er and tried ta run. Get 'er to a doctor, see if she's okay." Worth eyed him with some kind of buried pleasure as his clawed fingers began to sift in the dirty fur at his cuffs. "She is, by the way, f'ya still want a medical opinion. Happier'n most, really. Gals tend ta be a bit more vocal when they get bit. They like it more. Some of 'em even go places their own boyfriends couldn't take 'em."_

_He grinned cheekily; Lamont felt his face turning red under the ache of his black eye and his fists were suddenly at eye-level. He threw a punch upwards, sloppy from the pain in his head and his utter choking outrage, but the vampire caught it with a clammy slapping noise and leaned in close enough for Lamont to see the blood-spatter on his chin. He grinned humorlessly, fangs hooking over his bottom lip._

_"Your girly went someplace alright. But whoever's name she moaned, Monty, it wadn't yers."_

_Suddenly, all the tension went out of Lamont's arm. Worth, still two inches from his nose, gave him a look that wasn't quite victory but definitely had some sort of satisfaction in it. Lamont would learn later that Worth protected his own: protected them in a punch-you-in-the-nuts-until-you-learn-to-wear-a-cup sort of way, but he took care of his young human friend in whatever way he thought mattered. That included breaking off several of his (admittedly doomed) relationships in awful ways before they broke him. _

_Lamont stared, eyes glazed, as the vampire drew back with a grim smirk, rising to his feet and popping his neck with a jerk of his head. In a flash of white coat and stick arms, he swung himself up on a nearby dumpster, crouching there for a moment like a gargoyle. His eyes flashed white in a glare of passing headlights, yellowed teeth shining. _

_A fucking vampire._

_"Like I said, I like you. Don't like many people. You need anything, Monty, an' I don' mean ya need yer fuckin nose wiped… I'll be around."_

With that, he was gone.

Luce Worth. His guardian angel from hell and his introduction to the fact that the night was never as calm as it seemed. All those years, Lamont had had good reason to lock his doors when the sun went down. Luckily, it was Worth and no one else who was waiting for him in the shadows when, three months and a nasty break-up later, Lamont was refused for the second time for the office space he wanted.

It was common knowledge on the streets that the whole outfit was run by mobsters of sorts who already had his position covered and didn't want anything to do with the reputation of his own mobster family that had, unfortunately, long gone to seed. His father had taken drastic measures to move his wife and children out of the web of expectations set by the Touceys back in Virginia, but at the moment Lamont had regretted his lack of illegal pull a lot more than he should have.

Expectations crushed, trying to outrun a six a.m. shift at the warehouse by taking as many winding paths home as he could, he had been walking back home down a wide alleyway and thinking relatively murderous thoughts when he was surprised to hear them spoken aloud.

"_Should I kill 'em?"_

_The rasp came from behind him, deep in a building maze that no one wandered unless they had a death wish — and yet one he had called a backyard for most of his life. Skin tightening, Lamont turned with one sharp step and saw the hazy grey cloud first. At the end of the smoke trail was the vampire, his unshaven face lit by the dirty orange glow of his cigarette, mangy fur trim bunched up around his neck and wrists with unusual gusto._

_Somehow, it was more surprising that the undead man looked exactly the same after three months __than after__ fifteen years: more confounding was his exact state of unshavenness, although he had obviously scrubbed at his coat a little to get rid of the worst of the stains._

"_Chr — what are you doing here?" Lamont grit out, vacillating between hard-programmed fear and budding exasperation as his pulse spiked. The clash somehow left him incapable of his usual nervous giggle, but the twenty feet between them let him settle on the latter emotion, which was a relief. _

_As he watched, the vampire languidly plucked the smoldering cigarette stub from his mouth and put it out _on his fucking hand_ with a coy twist of his wrist__.__ Lamont's mouth fell open, earlier chill returning to wander his thick arms._

"_Lookin' fer an excuse to cause trouble," the vampire said with a grin, flicking the white tidbit away. His hand swung to his side and, surely just due to the shadows, it looked good as new. "But if there's none around, guess I'll have no scuse but to help you outta yer sore mess."_

"_What sore mess did you hear about?" Lamont muttered defensively, wanting the vampire as far away from his employment troubles as possible. And his personal life, really, or any mode of existing he tended to pursue. He was treated to an unsettling glimpse of just how much his old stalker usually heard when the vampire turned and began walking towards the street. _

"_I know what'cher goin for, and what'cha need is a home base. Build it an' they'll come, er some shit like that," the vampire muttered, gesturing idly. "If yer lookin fer a cozy basement, I know one. Central location, nice sturdy locks ta keep all the scary nighttime critters out." _

_This last part was drawled with a sardonic grin that the young man would become very, very familiar with as time went on. Obviously, the vampire was quite well acquainted with the horror of his appearance — or just the reputation of his race as a whole. Was it even polite to refer to them as a 'race'? When Lamont just stood at the end of the alleyway and stared at him, the vampire jerked his chin towards the street and started walking again with a pace that said he waited for no one._

"_C'mon, fat-ass. Hup hup."_

_No matter how much he hated the very beginning of a__n__ endless string of dickish nicknames, the moment the vampire disappeared from sight, Lamont knew the only thing to do was follow him. He rushed out of the alley and found him, to his great surprise, walking along at a perfectly human pace, a new cigarette already out and clamped between his narrow teeth. His long, narrow shoes slapped along on the dirty concrete, steering a lanky, slouching six-foot-something frame that Lamont studied unsurely from a safe distance. He walked to the side __of__ and a little behind his new vampire pal until they turned down an alley he had never seen before and stopped at the third door to the left._

_It was a fairly ordinary metal door, heavy-looking and sporting a huge lock. Obviously this was new, from the way the vampire glared at it and waggled the clunky contraption. His promise of locks had come to fruition, at least. Watching the vampire's mood spiral, Lamont was about to say something about knowing a lock-cutter around the corner when the vampire grunted and awkwardly lifted his foot and slammed his heel into the door. The industrial lock popped off like plastic handcuffs, metal door swinging inwards with a deafening boom. _

_Lamont could do nothing but stare; if he had had control of his fingers, he might have raised them to the long-gone shadows of the black eye he had sustained from fighting the creature that had just made shrapnel out of a twelve-gauge industrial lock with a flick of his foot. His skin was suddenly alive with tingles, half of them insanely grateful, the other half insanely frightened. The vampire tromped inside and when Lamont recovered enough wit (or complete lack of self-preservation) to follow, the over-awed staring continued. _

_Resplendent in the oily yellow light of a camping lamp the vampire produced from nowhere, a large concrete room lay to all sides of him. With as short on space as the city was, Lamont had almost never seen such a huge space indoors, especially not with husks of file-cabinets lining the walls._

"_This is …" he began hoarsely, automatically taking the lamp when the vampire thrust it into his hands._

"_Provided you kin pay the bill, s'all yours. All scept the back room," the vampire stated, nodding towards a door at the end of the complex. "I'll be usin' that."_

_Lamont didn't even care. He hadn't come prepared to haggle because he hadn't come expecting such a steal, or even the barest sliver of success. The property had a storage place and a front room that could hold a desk and a chair. It had four walls. Even something that looked like it had been a heater in another life._

_With a little work, it would be a business._

_"Thank you," he managed, after spending a few minutes repeatedly raising the lantern to the walls just for the sake of discovering the texture and the heft of the concrete again and again. He turned around, grin plastered on his face. "God. This almost makes up for all that stalking stuff. Almost."_

_"I'd consider m'self a sad 'scuse for a fang if it did," the vampire muttered around his cigarette, looking distinctly untouched by all the squishy gratefulness being shoved in his general direction._

_"So. If you've claimed the back room, then I guess you'll, uh … be around?" Lamont's numb smile abruptly faded as he realized he didn't know how old this spook was since he looked the same every single time he saw him. Or what the proper etiquette was for supernatural creatures. "Mister …"_

"_Worth," the vampire said, flicking his cigarette to the floor and smashing it with his heel. He glanced up, sharp red eyes catching the most malevolent of gleams from the far away lantern. "Add a mister an' I'll subtract yer balls. An yeah, I'll be around, but don' spect this cordiality shit ta last. Roommates ought'a know surnames an' that's as far as I'm gonna bend over fer you, Touthey. You'll see me comin' in and goin' out. I just want a place with a lock only I kin break. Ain't gonna clean dishes er help ya pick out curtains. Got it?"_

"_Got it," Lamont said awkwardly, then added a doubly-awkward, "Worth."_

_At last, he had a name and a foggy bipolar disposition to associate with the creature that had haunted his nightmares and movie dates alike for years on end. Looking at the vampire who seemed almost pedestrian grumbling and flicking ceaselessly at his lighter, which had suddenly crapped out on him, the stunned young man slowly came to the conclusion that Worth the bogeyman wasn't that bad … once you knew where to hit him. _

_Then, overcome by the excitement of his find, Lamont turned around and looked at the dingy place, grin growing as he moved toward the door of the back room that Worth had claimed as his own._

"_This … this is fantastic. It looks like it was already outfitted." He opened the door to the back room, sticking the lamp inside. The light caught the sharp corners of an aluminum table, bouncing back silver stripes in the warm darkness. Cabinets lurked further down in the small room, a tongue of white tape dangling from an ajar door. "Almost looks like a … doctor's office, actually. How did you —"_

_Just like before, he turned around and Worth was already gone._

Thus had gone their relationship for at least a year: Worth popping in and out of their shared estate, usually stalking right past him without a word as he tried to get the various pieces of the office into working order. Despite his original fortune and the bonus of an upstairs room (which he quickly converted into a bedroom with the lackluster addition of a deflated mattress), the place was a fixer-upper. He was too poor to hire out any of the work, which meant his knees were now permanently jacked up from kneeling on concrete for hours on end as he tightened the pipes that led to the rust-clotted bathroom and so forth.

He always put a crick in his neck, craning over his project-of-the-day to catch some hint of his roommate's existence in the instant before the huge metal door shut. One day he got brazen enough to ask if Worth kept a coffin in the back room. The vampire had scoffed and made a snarky comment (he seemed a little drunk, which really made Lamont wonder how the whole vampire thing _worked)_ but left Lamont with the impression he did use the room to sleep during the day. And that, really, was it.

Overall, Lamont was struck with how uninteresting it was to be roommates with a vampire.

Their business, personal and private, stayed very separate. There were no vampire issues, possibly if only because Lamont religiously brushed his teeth after eating anything with garlic and speedily disposed of any furniture with broken legs, or anything else that was wooden and pointy. He was still unsure of Worth's regard for him and was open to the thought his roommate might rip out his throat if he proved annoying, so he kept to himself the first year or so.

There were no vampire parties. Lamont was never treated to the horror movie version of a roommate bringing a girl home: the chilling echoes from the main room of Worth talking women into his 'crash' room to drink them dry. When the vampire emerged from his room around midnight looking incredibly hung-over, he just shrugged on his coat and immediately stalked out into the city. Lamont was rarely awake when he came back, but that was in his late twenties, before the future contractor had learned to become completely nocturnal to hit the peak business hours.

He was a bit too busy with his own problems to pay much attention to Worth, anyways. Over that year and half of the next, he struggled to run a regular consultant business in a city that had too many to offer. He simply pushed forward with the firm belief that if he hit his head hard enough against the wall, it would break down. Then it simply didn't and his third check bounced about the time he realized he had a real problem on his hands. In fact, he was so busy wallowing in the fact that he would have to consider taking out a loan to make the rent for that month that he ended up muttering something affirmative when Worth asked (sarcastically, he thought) if he should spread the word about his business.

The next evening, when a knock came at the big metal door, Lamont made the grave mistake of looking at eye-level instead of downwards. Though he managed to get through the following meeting without freaking out too badly, his entire life changed from that point onwards. He was soon to learn the difference between flirting with danger and pulling down her panties with his teeth.

_Lamont's head snapped around when the window squeaked and Worth dropped in from nowhere, landing on all fours._

_"You."_

_The word came out of him like a bazooka bullet, bulls-eye smack over Worth's motionless heart._

_"Me," Worth grunted, fluffing his fur collar as he rose and completely ignored Lamont and his reddening face. The heavyset young man took a few steps toward him, accusing finger leveled at his face._

_"Goblins? _Goblins_?" Lamont demanded, hardly able to force his mouth around the guttural word. A word from picture-books and lawn decorations, always racing toe-to-toe with leprechauns and fairies. Or just smooth-skinned, diminutive men that struggled to seat themselves on the chairs in front of his desk as he stared in horror. Lamont nearly tugged at his disheveled hair, entire body cramping with disbelief. _

"_Just … goblins, are you fucking _serious_?"_

"_Christ, who pissed in yer soup? They aw'ays pay." Worth sniffed, and smirked at him. "Thought you'd appreciate th'business, Monty. Y'were bitchin' about comin' up short in a few places. Couldn't do anything 'boutcher dick, so I figgered a few customers'd make ya feel more like a man. Was I righ'?"_

_"They were mustard-colored! And came up to my knee!" Lamont hissed, trying to make the vampire understand without words that he generally expected his customers to have noses instead of alarming slits that flared with every breath and the discrepancy was a _little fucking startling_. The whole 'securing thirty pounds of cement by next week' seemed almost stranger in context when requested by munchkins who, in his eyes, wouldn't have the slightest of use for it. "When I said I wanted business, I didn't mean … illegal citizens of the night!"_

"_You ever considered illegal citizens of the night as a business?" Worth asked shortly, stopping by his desk and just staring at him. Lamont drew breath, perfectly prepared to say _no_, then the vampire's honest as hell stare held out and kept him locked there, mouth empty. After a moment, Worth sniffed again and rummaged in his coat for a flask._

"_We ain't that organized. Too busy runnin from pitchfork mobs, and you don't see a fuckin supernatural phonebook anywhere. Could use someone to pull our shit together for us."_

"_A consultant for ghosts and witches and vampires. Werewolves," Lamont clarified after a long, stung silence, unable to fully close his mouth. Worth shrugged._

"_Ghosts, nah, but there's money in the rest of 'em. An I sure don' see any respectable humans knockin down yer door waitin ta franchise ya. Even then, they definitely ain't the safest'a things in this city. Half the time you'd be better off with selkies."_

_Lamont snorted incredulously even as his mind began to warm to the plan far too quickly. Monopolizing an entire avenue of business had never occurred to him, much less an avenue that no sane person believed in. In a few years, he would be arranging meetings between new vampires and blood dolls, planning exorcisms and smashing hoodoo objects surreptitiously. Selling silver bullets and kits. At that moment, however, his clientele seemed limited only to the scraggly, penniless creature in front of him, who grabbed a deflated pack of cigarettes from Lamont's desk drawer, where he had left them a week ago, and started for the high window again._

"_What could I do, get __you blood?" he threw out haphazardly, left grasping at air when Worth stopped and looked over his shoulder at him. Waiting to see what he could come up with. Lamont swallowed hard. "Just … raid a hospital at gunpoint and get those little blood bags or something?"_

_"Sounds like a plan," Worth slurred around his smoke, plucking it from his mouth just to take a swig of his flask. He gave a nod. "I'll take two. O-Negative or bust."_

_"Wha —Worth!"_

_"Hup hup, Monty. You'll be troll chow if ya twiddle yer thumbs like this in front of some'a the things I kin send ya. An don't be a pussy. Cash is cash is cash, no matter if ya gotta scrape the slime off it first."_

Just like so many of their life-changing conversations, it had ended with the slam of a door (a window, that time) and plenty of time to think about things.

By that point, Lamont didn't have much of a choice and so, after giving Worth the go-ahead, he went with whatever business came to him … and god, did it come. Though it took a long time to earn his clients' trust as a reliable, close-mouthed supplier, it was obvious he had popped the lid on a much-needed service to a starved market. He had also assumed Worth was being metaphorical about the slime part until he literally had to take a razor to a fifty that a ghoul handed him, but the diner bus-boy had pocketed it after little more than a suspicious glance at the oily green discoloration on President Grant's nose.

Still, the outrageous level of coping skill required in dealing with witches and night creatures suited him oddly well. It combined with all of the paranoiac training gifted to him by dodging Worth for fifteen years and made him buckle down, quit taking things personally, learn to smile like he meant the worst thing his client could imagine, and after just a few months, he had simply stopped being surprised at anything. Six years later … cozy didn't even begin to cover it. He liked his job. A lot. And, what was more, he felt like he could do it best and his reputation reflected that.

People needed what he did. They paid money to get it, but that didn't change that he was fulfilling a niche that, empty, would have left a lot of people in a bad state. Like Sweater-Vest-Zombie-Problem, who was probably now happy at home with his healthy pet corpse, and Veser, who had been paid and thus wouldn't come around to badger him for a while. No, even considering the outrageous cost of vitamin D supplements, it was an interesting, decent life and Lamont really wouldn't have it any other way, vampire roomie included.

Of course, there was the whole 'moving every few months so the dangerous ten-percent of his clients couldn't find him and disembowel him when things didn't turn out exactly as they wanted' thing, but thinking about that would drive anyone crazy so he generally didn't. Besides, he'd had Hanna set up some protective warding runes in his office. If anything was powerful enough to cross those uninvited, he was going to die regardless, so he just chose not to freak out about it. He was in a good place, so long as he chose to stay in that place.

The job security was more than anyone but a tax collector or a mortician could ever hope for, but heaven forbid he ever consider a change in profession.

Lamont's hazy, self-satisfied smile faded at the lingering thoughts of Hanna as he penned in the last boxes on the new contracting form. When the door to his office opened with a boom, he looked up. It knocked him out of his dawdling memories only to shove him back in: Worth strode in through the metal door, an oddity for such an early hour. Even odder was his gait, which bordered on bouncy.

"I was just thinking about you," Lamont told him after he took a preparatory swig of his beer. Between normal guy friends, it would have been considered maudlin or even just friendly had the younger man's tone not been distinctly aggrieved. Worth's snicker was immediate and altogether too pleased.

"Glad I gave ya time ta put'cher dick back in yer pants, then," he clucked sadistically, pausing to puff up his coat in an indulgent way. He sounded so damn _smug_ that his friend turned around in his chair, giving the stick of a man a mildly appraising look. An uncomprehending smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. He had long gotten accustomed to the odd pansexualism that seemed to claim every last vampire after a few decades (and how relentless and obnoxious the trait was in Worth's crass hands), but this was different.

"You're feeling … frisky," Lamont said the word delicately, like he was afraid it was accurate.

"Maybe I am," Worth threw back, whipping around, fangs hooked over his bottom lip in a sly grin. "Ya wanna be a nosy shit an' ask why?"

"I'm afraid to," Lamont sighed, scratching at his neck before picking up his folder again and shuffling the new form into it. He took another swig of his beer. "I think I'll just let it pass and wonder who you had to make miserable to get this much of a kick out of it."

"Ey, sometimes I get kicks outta doin' good shit. So long's someone else's already hit up on it and the vein's real close to the surface."

Lamont rolled his eyes, unable to help but smirk a little until he heard Worth's sharp shoes tap to a halt behind him.

"Aw yeah, wait," Worth grunted, voice almost pensive. "Reminds me."

Lamont could hear his footsteps backtracking and he turned around, shifting to prop his arm over the back of his chair. He opened his mouth to speak but never got that far: too fast for the eye to see, a fist smashed him square in the nose. Pain exploded behind his eyes, making him snap backward and then jerk forward.

"Aghk! Worth! What the — _fuck_ was that for?" he yelled behind his hand, which was quickly becoming slick with warm red run-off, like someone had put a faucet in his crumpled nose. Lamont grabbed the bottom of his shirt and bunched it up to his nose so the blood wouldn't drip onto his good khakis, then glared murderously at the vampire, agony knotting in his face.

Returning his glare full-force, Worth bent and got in his face with his awful teeth gleaming, both hands entrenched in his coat pocket.

"Fer spillin' my undead guts ta the faggot I sent ya!"

"Wh-_what_?" Lamont gagged out, still reeling from the pain and the taste of the blood bubbling down his throat. He could hardly trace the vampire's thought-process, let alone his anger, and cursed loudly when Worth kicked him in the leg with his pointy shoes. "Goddamn you! I don't even — what the hell are you talking about? Oh, god, wait, him? The guy, the dork with the sweater vest?"

Lamont almost called him 'Zombie Problem', but Worth's annoyed stare (and the threatening raise of his foot) was enough of an answer. Definitely the dork with the sweater vest. Lamont hurriedly scooted his chair around enough to escape the potential kick and coughed, pressing the shirt harder around his nose to stem the bloodflow.

"I dust tol' him de truf," he exclaimed resentfully. His voice grew even more nasal and more indignant as he muffled himself clumsily with the shirt. He gestured in irritation with his free hand. "And Christ, Worth, what was that anyways? It was like you gave him just enough information to fuck everything up. Where do you _find _these guys? I almost didn't know what to do since he said you _sent him_ here for something important — which, by the way, is ridiculous because you haven't rec'ed anyone for at least three years and you _live_ here. Or at least sleep here or pass out here, whatever you vampires do."

"That's what they're callin a bitch move these days, Mont," Worth said darkly, obviously still fixated on whatever imaginary offense his friend had committed through Zombie Problem. He leaned in with the utmost of gravity, red eyes narrowed to vengeful slits. "Accurate, considerin yer such a bitch."

Lamont swallowed hard and threw his hands up and rolled his eyes, through with trying to make sense of exactly why he got punched. Sometimes he wondered why he even _began_ to try.

"You're ridiculous. Why would it even _matter_ that I gave you a bad review? It doesn't — I mean, irrelevant doesn't even begin to cover it! You hate blood-dolls! It's not like you're even in the market for —"

Then Lamont stopped and stared, narrowing his eyes at Worth. Something – most likely Zombie Problem's strangely intimate knowledge of Worth's first name and his evil nature and possibly that slip about his dick – clicked in his brain. It clashed up against everything he had ever known of Worth before and after they got a little more honest about what kind of vampire he was and it still left him with a big steaming handful of the most obvious conclusion he didn't want to draw.

"Wait. Please don't tell me." At Worth's completely unresponsive stare, Lamont pressed forward a little more, scooting his chair out from his desk. "Not that guy."

Finally, Worth just smirked, thin mouth a crack in his lingering surliness.

"S'always the ones in the sweater-vests …" the vampire said loftily, tapping his scruffy chin like it was a great mystery he had the privilege to be let in on.

Lamont just stared at his undead pal in the hopes that his expression would change, like it would crack and find the vampire slapping his knee at the sheer idea. The ridiculous farce of Worth feeding off of one person for more than one night, much less in a row.

No dice. Worth's red eyes, if possible, only got a little more gleeful.

"Worth, you can't!" At a raised brow from Worth, Lamont relented and tilted his head, putting his big hands out beseechingly. Never good to tell a vampire what he could and couldn't do, especially one with as big an anti-authority boner as Worth. "I mean, unless you think you can? You said it yourself, you're not exactly a poster-boy for self control."

"You let me worry about me, Monters," he sniffed, clearly bored with their conversation.

"It's not you I'm worried about," Lamont muttered, then added loudly, more than a little pissed, "And you don't even worry about you! And … his sweater-vest! Seriously, Worth, you never send me pedestrians. He barely even wanted to admit that he knew a vampire. He was dying to say 'v-word'. I just didn't get it. I thought he was some kind of wanna-be cop or something, or looking for a hooker."

"And?" Worth's expectant stare caught him off guard, but the next part didn't: "You give 'im the ten-dollar Sunday special?"

"Shut up, Luce," Lamont growled, pressing the last of the blood from his nostrils and taking a sharp sniff, glaring at him. He couldn't help but be a little less amused by Worth's prickly wit after getting plugged by him, and his stuffy first name was a punishment for that trespass. He heaved himself up from his chair, waving his hand irritably and going for the rusty sink.

"What the hell did that have to do with you, anyways? He said he wanted help with a zombie. I mean, I gave it to him, but how did you even meet the guy? I'm going to get the doppleganger kit out if you tell me you've started going to parties, now."

The cavernous concrete office was quiet as Lamont yanked at the spigot until a mildly rusty flow got going, then splashed it up onto his red-streaked face. He looked back and called his friend's name again, but there was no answer and the vampire, propped against a file cabinet, didn't budge from his strangely focused stare at the wall.

As he did so frequently, Luce was not listening to Lamont. He was thinking a bit about Conrad.

He wasn't thinking about Conrad's sweater-vest, or how faggy and wimpy and generally irritating he was, or even how odd it was that he had bitten him about five times, but mostly how he shouldn't have called him peaches. He liked peaches. Had liked them. Then, a century later, he called a single awkward human 'Peaches.'

There was some simple math there that disagreed with Luce in the worst of ways.

After so long (not that pushing one hundred was particularly long for vamps, but it was long for _Luce_ who had measured his breathing existence not in years but in hits of snuff), seemingly irrelevant things could get you hooked into humans: Conrad's weird, cockeyed association with a beacon of salty living existence was making him think things he shouldn't think. It called to the scattered puzzle of his old self and wired it straight into Conrad's squishy, warm, inflating-deflating chest, bringing up memories and urges that had long cooled, or that Luce had discarded through sheer convenience. Never mind the fact he had never fed off of any human more than twice and he had practically sworn he never would. Never mind the fact that, had they both been human, chances were he would have had nothing to do with the artsy faggot.

It was astoundingly fucked up, but in that special way where he didn't know whether stopping it came at too high a cost: admitting something weird was happening at all.

But then Lamont said his name again, and Luce's eyes once again failed to catch on his (comparatively) young friend: instead, they fell on the single picture languishing on the sparsely populated book-shelf backed up against the far wall. It was one of the three of them, sealed in a cheap plastic frame and just about the only thing not listing to the side on the ramshackle shelf. A once in a lifetime moment that Lamont managed to capture on camera through luck or sheer idiocy.

They were in the back room. Luce himself was nothing but a floating coat, but even the wrinkles in his shoulders screamed his irritation and the sleeve was like a snake coming to eat the lens. To his right was a pair of lanky legs hooked over his operating table and bright, wide blue eyes.

All at once, he could hear the kid.

_"And then I groped around for it and couldn't find it and then right when it was about to smash my head into the wall, my fingers — woah, hey, cool, is that a Polaroid? That is so cool! How old is it, does it really — ow, hey!"_

_"You shut up. An' get that outta my fuckin face, Lamont, I'm tryin to sew up an idiot here."_

_"Hehehe, maybe if you mess up a little more, he'll be a little less enthusiastic about tracking down trolls in jeans and, heh, broken glasses."_

_"It wasn't so hard, I had everything under control the whole time! Hey, Lamont look, look, it's gotta be like a foot and a half long from end to end. That totally beats our record!"_

_"Hanna, heh, if there's a record, it's one hundred percent yours."_

_"Take the picture, take the picture!"_

_"Gaddamnit Hanna, quitcher squirmin' or else I'm gonna sew yer knees to yer nose!"_

_"Jeez, you're such a grump! Were you always like this or did, like, dying change your view on life?"_

_The kid laughed loudly at his own cleverness then winced at a hard warning tug on his stitches, only to immediately pull a face at Lamont over his shoulder, who chuckled guiltily. Obnoxious. Relentless. Insuppressible. Insane. _

_Worth put Hanna back together again with twitches of finger and twine, muttering around the needle in his mouth while Lamont waved the Polaroid idly, breathing color into it. Hanna whined and tried to reach for it, only to receive a sharp rap on the bloody knee from his doctor. Irritation bunched at the back of Worth's neck, where most of his Hanna migraines started, only exacerbated by the ever-present fog of cool blood and the acidic smell of the developing photo. Christ, he could remember when everyone was busting nuts over those clunky machines, and part of him couldn't even separate them from their blipping electronic descendants, even by sheer years. The world moved too fucking quick and breathed fad by fad, and he was already tired of trying to keep up._

_Queen and hypodermic syringes, he decided, were his last hurrahs: any other technological, cultural or social advances could just go fuck themselves._

_Finished, Luce threw the last of the twine back in his kit with a disdainful flick of his blood-covered hand._

_"I swear, kid, on a scale'a one ta ten of the wors' shit that's ever happened ta me, dyin' sits pretty at nine."_

_"Really? What's your ten?" Hanna chirped, taking a break from pressing the photo to his broken glasses to peek over the top of it, blue eyes curious._

_"You, idiot."_

_"Hey!"_

_"Now get off'a my bloody table and try not ta get yerself busted open like a fuckin' pinata! Next time, no numbin' runes, you get me? You pull somethin' stupid like that again, yer gonna face it up cold-turkey. F'you end up dyin' one'a these days, I sure as hell ain't gonna make it easy on you. Gonna make you regret every last fuckin' second of it."_

_"Cool it, Worth. He doesn't need you bickering over him like some deranged mother hen."_

_"Ya don't shut up, Touthey, yer next."_

"Worth. Worth. Did you hear me?"

Back in his dirty coat in Lamont's office, Luce looked down at the worn concrete floor and put another cigarette in his mouth and said what he'd wanted to say for months.

"Hanna's dead."

Lamont dropped what he was holding. It broke.

For a moment, the only sound in the big office, indescribably empty with just the two of them, was the last rattles of the soap dish fragments quieting. Then, their concrete-sealed world was completely still, sealed away from air or reality: the vampire could almost smell the bottled-up air that a years-worth of waiting and worrying had fermented into a grey asbestos, equal parts hope, denial and silent dread. Worth mentally reached for the weight of the broken porcelain on the ground, the scattered pieces, to keep from focusing on much of anything else.

Lamont's voice, hoarse and too loud, didn't help.

"What? Wh — _excuse me_?"

"He's dead. The kid who hung around here all the time." Worth gestured idly to his face, squinting at the floor. "Looked like he was twelve years old. Red hair. Glasses. Death wish."

"No. What? Shut up. He's just … gone," Lamont insisted, expression caught between shocked and severely pissed. His stand made, he stood awkwardly for a moment, hands clenched uselessly at his side. Then he bent to pick up the broken dish, obviously not knowing what else to do with himself after throwing a single dark look over his shoulder at the vampire, who was still hunched against one of his file cabinets. "Don't fucking joke about that. I don't know where he's gone, but he's not dead."

"Ya don' think it's a bit weird he dropped off the face of the earth fer a year? That pokin his nose around here every single week turned into nothin?" Worth drawled, flicking his lighter.

"This city isn't the only one that's messed up. Hanna was always talking about Chicago. He could have gone there."

But Lamont's voice was too flat, and he couldn't quite get a grasp on the fragments of the soap dish. Getting a grasp on what was actually happening must have been even harder. They had never talked about this before, never even mentioned it, and did so on a totally different level than how they usually didn't talk about things. Lamont mechanically tried to pile all of the shards into his big palms but they kept skittering away with splitting clinking noises that made his spine tighten, somehow adding to the rising tension in the air like blunt pins stabbing at a swollen balloon.

"Without tellin' us?" Worth asked skeptically. Lamont made a point not to look at him as the vampire resettled himself against the cabinet. Worth gave a shrug. "Yeah, guess that's possible. Or he could'a stayed here, dropped off the map and gotten himself killed."

"What the fuck, Luce. If you — " Lamont stood up and turned around, fingers clenching atop the shards of cheap porcelain he'd gathered. But the evolution of true anger on his face froze in its tracks, leaving him with his eyes wide and his lip uncurling. Worth's face was deadly serious. There was no room for cruelty or humor or anything else but heavy truth in it. Lamont's throat abruptly closed up.

Only after a long pause and several shortened breaths could he say it.

"… Hanna?"

"Yeah," Worth said into the orangey glow of the lighter in his cupped hand. "Hanna."

Visible only to Worth's sharp eyes, Lamont's back caved, his damaged knees shook. His broad shoulders dropped under the weight of processing both the information and Worth's flat expression. All of it crashed inside him, leaving him palming at his hair and staring unseeingly at the floor. He swallowed as many times as he could.

"Hanna's dead."

He made himself use his name, but the repetition left him with nothing. So Lamont, unraveling at terrifying speeds, went with something that made him feel something. His head snapped up.

"_How long have you known_?"

"'Bout a month. Been tryin' ta figure it out."

"Why didn't you _tell me_? I mean, he'd been missing but _dead_, I just—" He slapped his forehead, hating the crack in his voice. He breathed. Slowly. "Oh god. Oh fuck. Where is his … he? Fuck, where is he?"

"Right now? Dunno," Worth muttered. He sucked in lungful of hot smoke and shrugged again. "Probly snoopin' around some alley with that dick in the hat."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Lamont demanded after a long pause. He couldn't close his mouth; the second rush of uncomprehending frustration and fear left him staring at Worth like he wasn't real. "He's dead. You said he's dead."

"Yeah. An last time I checked, you've known a shit ton of dead men who fancy strolls in the middle'a the night."

"Wait a minute. Wait a _fucking minute_."

Worth watched as Lamont's big hands clenched into his hair, the twist of his features communicating how he was processing the overload of information. When he spoke, his voice was dangerously deadpan.

"You're telling me that Hanna is dead and walking. Which means that he's … been resurrected. Somehow." Lamont looked up and straight at Worth, round face strangely rigid around his glittering eyes. "Which also means, with the way you work, that the guy that you sent here, with the _important_ question about the zombies. That … was for Hanna."

Luce's only answer was a dull stare, which was too quiet of a harbinger for Lamont's sudden, hoarse sound of rage and the sharp swipe of his arm across his desk. A stapler and his beer bottle went flying, both crashing onto the floor.

"God damnit! You need to _tell_ me these fucking things and not send secret agents! I didn't even know! How could you do that, Worth? How? I've had a private investigator on my bill for four months looking for him and — fuck, _how can you be such an asshole_? What the _fuck_!"

If Lamont had been any less angry, he would have been knuckle-deep in Worth's shirt, slamming his bony body into the file cabinet, red neck spider-webbed with veins. They turned to fighting so often, it wouldn't have been any surprise — and, absorbing the sickening shocks of the other man's emotion into his dry body, Worth would have silently let him hit him again and again — but this anger was too big and too hopeless for any collision. Trapped, it ravaged the man's insides, exiting only in another hoarse half-scream of rage. The frustration and anger was all the more disturbing when contained in his shaking hands and thick arms. It went on for as long as his body could bear it.

Then, when the sound of his howl faded and his throat unclenched, Lamont stepped back and fell preternaturally still, emptied at a cellular level.

To his left, Worth hadn't moved. He just watched him have his moment. The vampire continued to watch as Lamont found his chair with a single numb hand and slumped back into it, shaking. He leaned forward, then leaned back, features tightening then going slack. A slow-motion version of a madman rocking himself away from reality.

"Shit," Lamont croaked at last, shutting his eyes. They stung.

He couldn't take it. The idea of Hanna just … _stopping_ hadn't made it past his skin yet. It would later that night, he knew. Start to gnaw at his red insides, rot him and wilt him.

Maybe the idea of Hanna's death, something he had feared for so long, was made even more disturbing by the fact that he was still around. There was no time to grieve or think about the loss. No time to think about what life meant, symbolized by that _exit_. The big man pushed his hands over his eyes, harder. His heart didn't know how to react, bungeeing between two extremes. His voice caught.

"Oh g — oh shit."

"Yeah," Luce agreed grimly, straightening himself. The vampire shook his head, tucking his lighter back into his coat. "Not much you kin say 'bout it that makes sense."

"How did this …"

"Dunno how it happened. He doesn't even know, 'parently. But someone raised 'im. Someone murdered the kid and raised him."

Worth's voice went so cold, his tone so fatally steady, that Lamont looked up, expecting the vampire to be gritting his teeth or glaring or shaking in a rage (wanting an immortal body to relieve him by expressing the full rage he couldn't), but Worth's tall frame was stiff as it always was, red eyes trained on him with awful clarity.

"You know any necromancers, Mont?"

"No. Not here, not in this city," Lamont answered after a long pause, pushed into responsiveness by the relentless nature of the vampire.

Luce had seen too much to let this trip him up: and if he had tripped, it had happened in the month before this. Forcing himself to reach for the strings and bring them together, Lamont breathed out shakily. Thought about the fucked-up world he survived in. Made himself say it.

"Who could have … killed him?"

"Hopefully not the same folk who raised 'im," Worth muttered, putting a cigarette between his lips and turning for the door. He motioned back over his shoulder without looking. "You stay away from 'im."

"I don't even know where he is," Lamont said weakly, eyes falling back to the floor.

The thought scared him. He knew that, but he also realized he suddenly didn't know if he wanted to see Hanna more than anything or whether the exact opposite was true. He'd never seen an attractive undead. The idea of Hanna as anything but pink-skinned and bright-eyed and fast-moving was as foreign and repulsive to him as rotting meat.

"Don't try an' use yer spook-web to feel him out like the goddamn spider you are," Worth pushed, voice hard. He gave his friend a steely look and reached for the handle of the big metal door. "I'm handlin' this. I'll get 'im back. Meantime, you don't try an' help, you don't try an' mess with me."

Worth's horribly solemn tone lingered in the cold air longer than the slam of the door. Alone, Lamont breathed in. Alone, he dealt with whatever he had been subconsciously holding in because of Worth's relentless stare.

After a few mangled, dry sob-like breaths, Lamont grunted and jabbed his knuckles against his clenched eyes, forcing his body to still. He stared blankly at the broken beer bottle on the floor to keep from looking at the damn photo on the bookshelf.

Hanna Falk Cross.

He loved the kid. Loved him fiercely and awkwardly under the generally sleepy surface of his being. Loved him like an older brother or an uncle, even as he never quite knew how to deal with him when he thought about it too hard. And he was …

"Fuck," he whispered tensely, realizing there were a thousand other questions he hadn't asked, but he didn't want to know the answers to any of them. Not right now. He could barely breathe around the vacuum left by the deflation of twelve months of vague yet dwindling hope and one impressively calm call to a private investigator. He realized, now, he had been waiting. He had been waiting with all of him for just one phone-call that started with a clatter of phone against glasses, and a _Hey Lamont, okay, I've been in Chicago this whole time, so don't tell Doc because I really think he'll kill me if he finds out but I have to tell you about this gnome city I found—_

Suddenly, Lamont's face knotted up again and he had to put his hand over his chest. That the imagined scene rolled out so effortlessly in his head was proof of two things: he had subconsciously tailored it to perfection and Hanna was still very much alive in his head. Lamont bowed his head and breathed out and had almost succeeded in letting go of that fantasy when two cold hands came down on his shoulders. He went painfully stiff in his chair, hands slapping down on the armrests.

"Is Cujo gone yet?"

"Fuck, oh god. Where did you — "

Face white, he looked up: smiling down at him was both an intensely beautiful woman and the very last customer he wanted to deal with at that moment.

"Well, hello," she said cheekily, resting her softness against the back of his head. He felt her shift behind him and could only vaguely remember that they had promised to meet tonight. Vaguely.

"Hey. Uh, hehhe. Heh. Hey," Lamont caught his breath and patted her hand absently, maybe to keep from pushing it off. Her nails were too sharp and too close to his neck. What was it with these people and nails? "Yes, the, ah … he's gone."

"What's the matter? Your poor little heart sounds like you've seen a ghost."

Thankfully, he didn't have time to answer her: she leaned in before he could do so, gripping his round jaw in her tiny hand.

"Did he give you that?" she demanded, clearly not amused. It took him a minute to realize she was talking about his crushed nose, which had started bleeding onto his shirt in fat droplets. Lamont came back into his body with a little sigh of surprise. It felt like years since Worth had punched him in the face. The injury was from a lifetime ago, where benefit of the doubt had kept Hanna alive in his mind against all rationale.

"Yes, hon," he said flatly, wiping away a thin stream of blood.

Pushing his chair around, she fussed over him in that slightly predatory way that always got Lamont bothered if not awkwardly hot and bothered, but at that moment he was practically incapable of reacting. Even the generous view of her scoop-necked cleavage wasn't drawing his eye. She leaned down and licked the tip of his nose and nothing happened. She frowned and actually looked at the contractor for the first time since arriving.

There was a world of sorrows in the lines under Lamont's dark eyes and the bend of his back, but she didn't give them a spigot by asking after them: instead, she looked up and sniffed once, pretty face wrinkling.

"How can you stand to work here, with this smell?" she muttered, glowering at the water-stained corners and listing file cabinets. "Is he even house-trained? It smells like he pisses in the corners."

"He has his reasons," Lamont said tiredly, leaning sideways onto his desk and trying to force himself to think about cleaning up the broken beer bottle.

"What?"

"The whole … being filthy, rolling around in garbage thing," he clarified, supplying a few circular hand-motions. "I know it sounds insane, but he does it for a reason."

"I'm not talking about that. You can't smell that … _stench_?"

Lamont looked up at her doubtfully. Her absolutely revolted expression thoroughly knocked him off of any other thought track and, really, there wasn't much more he could ask for at the moment. He blinked at her.

"… Besides the garbage?" he asked almost stupidly. Pulling her weight from the back of his chair, she snorted disdainfully and tossed her dark, artfully tangled hair.

"Forget it. I wouldn't expect a human to understand."

Lamont sighed so deeply his eyes fell shut, the cold sensation of earlier edging slowly up his chest. Triggered by her shrug-off, he was suddenly wrapped up in Hanna again as all the details hit him anew, weighing him into his chair. Then he oofed as a light yet solid weight plopped down in his lap, the sleeves of a black and green dress-sweater-thing suddenly looped around his shoulders.

"So have I gotten any buzz?"

If Lamont winced, it was short-lived. His training as a supernatural contractor had some use after all. Instinct took over, rendering him the mild-mannered businessman and not a soul both grief-stricken and confused.

"Uh. No, sorry, it's been … hectic," he said lamely, ducking equally from her predatory expression and her cleavage.

"Have you even put my info in the file?" she demanded. Her voice was tight with enough real annoyance that Lamont instantly hid his neck, waving his hands in a thoroughly distracting manner.

"_Yes_, but, heh, I'm sorry, I don't think the audience for hehe, eh, memory charms is that big. Don't be, uh, nervous or anything. Heh. Just wait."

"Why should I be nervous?" she purred after just one beat, white hands slipping over his jugular and sifting through the damp hair at the back of his neck. His eyes nearly crossed from both the touch and the sudden switch. She cocked her head to the side, full lips mirroring the sideways amusement. "I have the best agent money can buy."

"I hehehe, heh. You know, you say that, but, heh … I've yet to see any money," Lamont said in a way he hoped was teasing but sincere enough. It was so strange to be reduced to ardent hintings when the vampires were in his lap rather than across his desk. He was usually pretty firm with people.

Her smile widened and she leaned in expertly, stunning him with a wave of perfume and perfect pressure.

"I was pondering the idea of a … service-based arrangement."

"Eheh … ehe, I, uh, heh — " He swallowed. Swallowed again, if just because of how her eyes flicked to his bobbing throat and narrowed just a fraction. "Far be it from me to, heh, er —"

Strangled in that awkward place between wit and a fight or flight response, Lamont found himself a stranger in his own chair, overwhelmed by the insides of her thighs, sandwiched together in the tight skin of her sweater-dress. His eyes finally dropped to her very close bosom, white and glowing with bluish shadows in the dip of her neckline. Her breasts and the curve of her neck were almost glacial.

Mostly, however, he was struck dumb by how badly he needed this distraction, which was the final determining factor in making the subconscious if not willful reversion to being a stuttering moron, mostly because it was the easiest thing to do when caught between a dead friend and a beautiful woman. Only one of them was still going to be there if he sent her away, which he had also learned never to do.

He sucked in a sharp, shaking breath, shifting his legs underneath her curves.

"I mean, it – I don't, heh, normally – haha, hehe – would only, normally, for, uh, for pretty – "

"Just invite me upstairs, moron," she murmured with a velvety smirk, one hand flat on his warming chest, the other tangled in the back of his hair. He only had to look at her lidded red eyes to realize he'd made a bit of a mistake in letting things get this far. Letting her get past his desk hadn't even been a good plan, really. But, while he was fucking things up, this sounded like a good mistake to bet on.

"Uh, okay?" he whispered through a stricken half-smile, unable to help sounding like a schoolboy.

She grinned at him, flashing ivory points, and Lamont made a mental note to revise his customer contract laws as she pulled him from his chair and towards the locked staircase door, which boomed shut behind them.


	21. Last to Know

A/N: New record: 21 chapters into a ConWorth fic without the obligatory Call from Conrad's Mom. Not that … there has ever been a ConWorth fic 21 chapters long. Euff.

That fact about vampire bats? Fantastically legit. Whether or not it would be on the Discovery Channel is another thing … Hee. Otherwise, Worth, you're a dirty liar.

Also, I love how Tourettes-y Conrad gets when Worth pops up in his house and work (and car?) and other places he foolishly assumes are safe.

TWO. MORE. FINALS. HNNGH. S-so close.

_Warnings: language, disturbing/violent concepts, vampire stuff, intense sexual content (full version on yGal), nice identity epiphany time with ConMom, blackmail with fruit, indescriminate use of swooshing powers_

* * *

Last to Know

* * *

At five to midnight, Conrad trekked up the last of the narrow stairs to his condo, a plastic grocery bag thwapping against his thigh and his phone propped on his shoulder.

"I said it's fine, mum. It's just … strange to have you up so late, is all."

"I couldn't sleep. There was a mix-up with my prescription. I don't trust the generic. Are you doing alright? You sound a little faint."

At the sound of his mother's piercing voice hitting _that note_ for the hundredth time in his life, Conrad suddenly didn't have the energy to keep his eyes open anymore.

For once it wasn't her phone connection or her criminally vivid imagination. Conrad felt awful to the point where he couldn't keep it out of his voice, which was saying something considering who he was talking to. It was Monday. Five days ago, he had taken his scalpel to Hanna. Now, even thinking about it made him get a little sick.

He had somehow powered through the rest of the week without getting dragged down, but drifting through the weekend and then being forced back into the morgue Monday, like nothing had changed, somehow made it all come back like bad meat left to sit for a week. If his voice was as wrecked as his mind, he probably sounded like he had cholera. Conrad grimaced and tried to string some suitably appeasing words together.

"Yeah. It's just …"

It was just that he'd stumbled into a world where gnomes and vampires were common subjects and he had to cut open reanimated young men and, worst of all, he had already lived in a world where people _did the things_ that had caused the marks on Hanna. He'd seen the same things on other patients, possibly worse, but always scattered over several bodies and he'd never _known_ any of them before. To say he no longer felt safe in the dark was a crushing understatement. Conrad took a deep breath, squeezing his iPhone just to find the sluggish pulse in his fingers.

"The last few weeks have been tough. Lots of things happening at work." He stopped on the brightly lit landing and dug his keys out of his pocket. Hearing her wait, he fit them to the lock and added a sullen, helpful, "You know."

"Oh," his mother breathed, like she was releasing a smoke ring of pained understanding and subtle horror.

'You know' was code for 'creepy crap that I don't want to talk about' – or so his mother had always assumed. Mostly, it was a helpful implied excuse Conrad had stumbled upon a few years ago that got him out of explaining the more gruesome yet mundane examples of his nightly work to her, because genuinely creepy crap happened a lot less often at a morgue than people would think. At least, it had until the Detective came along.

Conrad pushed inside his studio condo, but one look at his spotless, dark kitchen drained the last of his energy out of him. Yanking his keys out of the lock, he found he couldn't go any further; resettling his iPhone mechanically against his ear, he leaned limply against the doorway, head hung low. He waited. This was usually when his mother reminded him to take his supplements (calcium, vitamin B and iron because, although he wasn't anemic, their family history showed he had a possibility of it and it was better to be safe than anemic) and get to bed early (because it was scientifically proven that people slept better when the sun was down and why did he have to work so late?) and pushed the conversation onto church picnics and all he was missing at home. All the mind-numbing, colloquial little things that were central to her life, mostly because he was missing them.

"I understand. It can be hard, of course it can be hard."

Conrad fought to keep from tuning her out. He heard her hesitate, nearly heard the rub of her fingers on her swollen knuckles through the sudden squeeze in her voice.

"But are you alright, there? You know … by yourself?"

"I'm fine, mum," he sighed, dearly wanting to find an excuse to hang up but simultaneously too exhausted to try. He parted himself from the doorframe with a heave of his chest and trudged into the chrome and corners fractal that was his kitchen. Threw his keys on the fancy aluminum table in the way that clanged so loudly in the empty, unlit condo. "You don't need to visit."

"That's not what I mean. You know that's not what I mean, don't you?"

Conrad paused in the middle of unloading his grocery bag onto the table, keeping it suspended an inch above the table before setting it down and frowning suddenly. Did he?

For the first time in a long time, the coroner's mind reached beyond the eternal interpretation of 'are you alright by yourself' between him and his mother: since fifteen, it had been a dangling lure to ask for visitation rights during time with his father, or at least not a direct refusal to drop by for longer than she should. Now Conrad realized that he was a twenty-seven year old man who hadn't had a real date for two years after a plane-crash of a half-relationship his mother didn't even know about … and now, maybe, she was asking him if he was alright being alone in _that way_.

The simple thought almost made Conrad's mouth drop open.

He had never broached the subject of his sexuality with his father but it was impossible to keep anything from his mother. Her thick fingers had been knotted in his very muscle tissue as a child and the gaps had never quite closed no matter how his pale limbs elongated: she was still able to get under his skin and deeper still. Her reaction to his initial confession had been awkwardly demure but left him feeling grateful he hadn't received the hellfire and damnation speech her conservative upbringing called for. After a while, namely four years of tacit avoidance of relationship talk, he had gotten the impression that his mother was relatively all right with him being gay as long as he was gay by himself.

"I just, I know it isn't my place sometimes, but I worry about you in that way," his mother was saying in that quivering voice that made him flash back on the plushness of her upper arms when they had locked around his neck and squeezed him into her doughy, tear-wet chest. The way they always shoved against his ears and cut off his hearing, how he had to lock his knees and stay still in the rayon scratch of her blouse until she was done heaving, heaving, heaving.

Conrad shook his head, knocking loose all those years of just him and her before she got on anti-depressants, and tried to listen.

"I know you know that, but really I just worry about you being alone, Conrad. Have you met anyone? Anyone at all? They have dating services for you, don't they?"

Conrad found himself staring blankly at the stylized, number-less clock on his wall, mouth indecently wide. Shit. Was this happening? At midnight on a Monday night? It was like the Twilight Zone had arrived an hour early.

"Well, I — it's just. Things have been busy lately but I've … uh, yes?"

Then he immediately slapped at his leg and hissed _shit_ when he heard his mother gasp, realizing she'd heard the wrong yes. Not the dating-service yes, but the _yes_ yes.

"Really. So you've … met someone."

Christ. She sounded almost … happy. Unsure-happy, _trying_-happy, but mostly not-horrified. The idea made his throat close a little; made him more reluctant to correct her and make her believe her son was never going to be happy and well-adjusted as a gay man, which she had always regarded as a rather troublesome personal choice of his. _Oh no, mum, you misheard me: I'm alone as I've always been, and looking forward to many more years of coming home to an empty cave of a condo, smelling like dead people_. His stomach flopped, suddenly both empty and full.

"Y-yes. Yeah, I have," he croaked after a minute. He thought he was blatantly lying until he found himself swallowing down the easily-identified lump of 'complicated circumstances.' "Met someone."

Technically. Then again, if he wasn't at least moderately acquainted with the man who routinely broke his balcony doors in and drank his blood, that was a sadder state of affairs than being an ex-paranoiac gay coroner who was also crushingly alone. With broken balcony doors.

Conrad blocked the iPhone speaker with his cheek and groaned softly when he realized what, exactly, he was doing.

"What … are they like?"

There were few stranger things than awaiting the abrupt end of an uncomfortable conversation only to find himself drifting further and further into the soft crackle of a silent, expectant phone-line.

Conrad dearly didn't want to go down this road, but the fact that his mother was asking at all … sex-non-specific pronouns regardless, she was asking him about himself. The man he'd maybe become, instead of the little boy she kept trying to drag out. Besides, it was easier to lie if you had truth to base it on, wasn't it? No, that was a piss-poor attempt at lying to himself, which was something he'd always been exceptionally good at. Fuck, what was he doing?

Conrad took a deep breath and thought about Luce Worth. Edited.

… Sterilized, dry-cleaned and trimmed with a jump-started heart.

"My … yes, him. He's, ah … a little older than me." A sardonic smile tweaked the corners of his mouth even as his inner-self groaned loudly. Struck with the thought that maybe Luce's heretical humor was starting to rub off on him, Conrad pushed on. "He's tall and, uh … blond. I think."

_Hard to tell through all the dirt._

"Oh? What does he … you know, do?"

"I don't … doctor. He's a doctor."

Conrad had no idea why that came to him. Maybe because all mothers wanted to hear that their daughters (sons?) had found doctors, but it made him want to laugh a little hysterically, which he hid by clearing his throat.

"He has … very weird hours. Night shifts all the time."

"Well, that's nice," his mother said slowly, then continued with the forcibly positive air of someone reduced to using a trowel to _dig_ for bright spots. "Doctors are good people. Usually. Except for the ones that kill people. And he'll be able to take care of you, with all of your medications."

"Uh. Yes. That's … exactly what I thought," Conrad answered hesitantly, then grinned vapidly into the hallway of his empty house.

That last exchange seemed to mark the edge of his mother's ability to acclimate: their conversation jerked, incorrectly gear-shifted to a different topic (an aunt's malady), and she excused herself with a nervous tone, already caught within the heady swirl of her casual hypochondria as she worried aloud about her Tuesday workday and an expected three hours of sleep. Conrad wished her a pleasant night, and his iPhone beeped in his ear. He moved it in front of his face and frowned slightly, adding one tally to the times his mother had ever been the first to hang up on him.

Alone again, the coroner stared at the phone for a minute before putting it in his red scrubs pocket, then leaned on his table and breathed in the dry, recycled air of his condo. He would feel guiltier about lying to his mother if it hadn't been a survival practice since puberty, but he could fast feel the uncertain prickle of the conversation growing to a burn. Questions, reasoning, regrets. He didn't want to lie, not because he felt guilty about deceiving his mother about finding a partner, but because he honestly wanted it all to be true.

At the risk of sounding like a whiny teenybopper in the middle of the rising supernatural hell-waters of his life, was he ever going to get a boyfriend?

Was he even the sort of person that was capable of that … lauded, serendipitous run-in (at a coffee shop or maybe a book store, reaching for the same copy of "Of Mice and Men") that stumbled into a nervous date or two and then evened out into a reliable, safe thing called a relationship, complete with phone numbers and dinners? Someone to cook for, someone to come home to. Someone to give a key to.

His friends were all in steady relationships, a fact made even more obnoxious by their routine inquiries of his own relationship status. To put the cherry on the wretched cake, the one time he did manage to have someone interested in him, it was an undead prick who saw him as collateral. And dinner.

_Well, technically that takes care of cooking for him …_

Conrad bit his lip and cursed silently, turning to unpacking the sparse grocery bag with an almost manic energy. Tomatoes and avocadoes hit the table with hollow thumps. He hated thinking about Luce when he didn't mean to, even if this was an excusable sequence of thoughts. It happened so much more than he wanted it to.

To make it worse, half of it was his fault. The coroner had that kind of injured, wistful mind that made things seem so much sunnier than they actually were: as much as he had fun mentally ranting about the vampire, getting out a little of his eternally bottled-up anger, he always forgot how much of an asshole Luce was until he was right in the room with him. Part of him honestly thought that he _could_ miss Luce … and then there was the other part of him that didn't waste time missing and just actively prayed for the vampire to drop into his closeted little world as soon as possible, even if it was just for a fuck or something equally shameless.

He was beginning to get a little frightened at his tendency to excuse broken furniture with sexual favors.

Suddenly, Conrad looked up, hand clamping down hard on a cucumber. He stood as still as he could, holding his breath. In the absence of the breathy hum of the heater, he could barely hear a muffled noise coming from the living room. There was someone in his house.

Though his skin prickled, he didn't have the energy to be frightened. Cucumber in-hand, the coroner walked slowly past the tiny hall and the shadow-black wall of his couch, concentrating only on the meticulous heel-to-toe rock of his white shoes. He rounded the corner, throat sealed shut, then frowned uncomprehendingly at the visual blare of the TV, which was on some sort of nature channel.

Conrad squinted at the furry mass wiggling on-screen until it solidified into tiny claws, a waxy pink crunched-can nose and pinprick fangs. Bats. His frown gained definition and definite annoyance.

He must have set some sort of timer that he had forgotten about. Shoulders dropping in relief, Conrad picked up the remote and clicked the TV off, quickly shaking the forgotten thing from his mind. Ready for a shower and bed, if just to simplify his life and have a seven-hour respite from thinking. Three steps into the hallway, however, the TV clicked back on and was buzzing again, making Conrad cock his head then turn around.

More bats. Staring the TV down like a cowboy in a westerner, Conrad grabbed up the remote again and clicked it off. It came back on.

Off. On.

Conrad glared hard at the TV, prickle of uncomprehending irritation standing fast against any fear or weirdness. Clenching his jaw, he clicked it off in _all seriousness_ and threw the remote on the couch, as if to say that was the last time it was ever going to happen, and then turned on his heel, ready to say fuck you to the night.

"The hell d'ya need two remotes anyways?"

"Holy shit the fuck!"

Conrad twirled around and stumbled into the wall, realizing only seconds before chucking his vegetable ammo into the dark that his streamlined designer couch was far lumpier than usual. There was, in fact, a man-shaped pillow slouched in the weak yellow light from the window, but it was a man-pillow he knew. Luce was staring grumpily at the dark screen, legs spread wide enough to let a barge through. He flipped Conrad's extra remote in his hand a few times and then tossed it aside, transferring that bored stare to the coroner with a dash of 'well what'd you expect'? Then his mouth twitched into a smirk.

"Thing about you'n me, Confag, I always seem'ta be inneruptin' somethin'."

Conrad stared vacantly at the vampire until he realized Luce's smug look was pinned on the cucumber in his hand, then he tossed the regrettably phallic vegetable aside like it was on fire. His crunched-up brain was abruptly eighty percent illegible expletives, leading to a scream-growl-howl which he barely confined in his mouth. After a bit of furious flailing, Conrad forcibly centered himself, then ground his teeth in the dark of his closed eyes.

What the fuck. He was so used to being alone that the pure presumption of that perpetual solitude kept him from seeing a man sitting _right on his couch_. He'd been a little distracted, admittedly, but wasn't it sad when your default setting was _alone_ so much so that it walled you in from even the possibility of seeing someone else's presence?

"What the hell, Luce," he huffed, unable to raise his voice any louder than a low growl. For a moment, Luce didn't answer, instead leaning back with undue luxury on Conrad's _very_ clean couch.

"Didja know," the vampire began with a truly troubling curiosity, "that girly vampire bats kin bend em'selves double when they're gettin' screwed, an' lick up on the guy bat's dick?"

"_What_?" Conrad croaked in unrepentant horror, voice cracking.

"S'fuckin' brilliant," Luce commented reverently, propping his legs wider still and scratching at his chin.

"You would know," Conrad snapped when he found his voice. He mentally kicked himself for the third-grader comeback, then narrowed his eyes. "Wait, do you? Know? Not that I want to know if you've – just, fuck, can't you turn into a bat? Like that little purple monster that was here? Or … something?"

"Nah," Luce answered with a tilt of his head, long fingers sifting in the fringe of one of Conrad's rare fringe-y pillows. "Win some, lose some. Traded it in fer the house thing, figure."

Conrad caught himself being interested (what the hell kind of vampire was he? And of course, out of all the possible Lestats in the world, he would get the filthy mutant one with the drug problem) before he shoved it all aside and remembered to be pissed. Genuinely pissed, if only to play offense and cover the fact that he had just used Luce as his fake boyfriend to make his mother think he wasn't a loser. At the thought of Luce having overheard that conversation, his stomach clenched awfully, and not even in the right way.

_Fuckmefuckmefuckme._

"I'm not in the mood for you," Conrad decided, bending to pick up the discarded vegetable and starting back to his kitchen.

"Then le's make it short, princess."

Conrad stopped in the middle of reaching for the light-switch, then flicked it up with another tense sigh.

He knew what Luce meant: give him what he wanted fast, and he would leave. But that phrasing sounded so much less independent and properly pissed than 'give that breaking-and-entering bastard whatever it takes to get him out of my damn house'. Ignoring the difference, Conrad turned around to catch Luce slouching around the corner, hands hidden by his furry cuffs. The vampire set up shop against the far wall, by Conrad's favorite triptych of conservatively framed postcards, and arched a brow expectantly.

Asking the vampire what he wanted to know seemed too redundant to even be insulting. Conrad opened his tall, narrow steel fridge and tucked the cucumber into a drawer just to have something to do with his hands. That done, he turned around and made himself start speaking before he could think better of it.

"They came to the morgue again, about five days ago. Hanna and the Detective."

"Yeah?" Luce demanded, expression unchanging. Part of Conrad was pricked by the vampire's near-abusive persistence, but the small offense was smothered by the weight of what was waiting at the back of his own throat. Something he simultaneously wanted to say and never wanted to speak of again.

"They had me, uh … they wanted to know …" Stranded away from any kitchen counters to hold onto, Conrad fretted at the collar of his black turtleneck. He ducked his head. Said it all at once. "I found out how Hanna died."

Luce didn't speak, but his red eyes sharpened in a way that made a muted chill push its way down Conrad's caving spine. The coroner's arms folded over his middle, shoulders closing in around his neck. The blue-black night outside pressed against the walls of his too-tiny condo, unaffected by the sick yellow of the streetlamps shining through the window. If anything, they only made the shadows deeper.

"You were right. He was murdered." Conrad swallowed thickly and added croakily, "Horribly."

"How?" The word was an animal growl: a dog snarl.

"There were, uh, seven stab-wounds on his back. But it was strange because, the way the cuts were oriented, the blade had to have been curved, with two sharp edges. No jack-knife, no cleaver, no dagger. They weren't normal in the slightest. That was the, uh, actual cause of death."

Maybe Luce could hear the meek, ragged _I hope_ in his voice, because his face pinched suspiciously, lip hiking over his jagged teeth. Conrad sucked in a nauseated breath and clamped his arms tighter over his roiling stomach.

"At least, I hope it was. God, I mean, he was in the ground for a while, it makes it … difficult. But the rest of the … wounds …"

"The arm-bands and the stitch necklace," Luce growled, body visibly brittle beneath the limp weight of his white coat. His hands were balled into fists at his sides. Conrad nodded, quick and small.

"He was … dismembered. You know. Just, taken apart." A hoarse, sick gust of breath pushed out of him, nearly making his knees buckle. Conrad reached for the nearest counter, squeezing his eyes shut against the shivers and his quick, miserable breaths. "Oh Jesus fucking Christ. His fucking head was cut off."

The instant Conrad had felt the click of severed vertebrae sliding against each other, loose dry knobs knocking together around the drain of the empty spinal column, he was rushed with the hallucination of the horrible weight of the dead boy's head falling into his lap and he nearly bashed his own head in scrambling to the sink and retching up everything he had.

The scars had seemed like some kind of zombie necessity or garish prop before then, the raised black bumps of twine a little like accents on a vase. Now Conrad knew that each of them catalogued something awful. Something real.

Something, maybe, Hanna had been lucky enough to forget.

Conrad looked up at a furious growling noise only to see Luce take two steps and slam his arm into the top of his metal kitchen chair, which gushed up around his arm like play-doh.

"The f – my chair!"

The vampire's head whipped around too fast to see. The preternatural blur made the coroner's heart smack against the back of his throat. His back hit the counter and the fluorescents in his kitchen were suddenly too bright, all buzzing nasally. After a moment, Luce's fist visibly clenched and he pulled his arm out of the massive dent. He seemed to get some kind of a grip on himself, but not before scaring Conrad shitless with the primal gleam in his eyes.

"It happened after 'e died," Luce snarled, leveling a finger at the coroner as if this were all a book he was writing. Conrad put his hands up.

"As far as I can tell, y-yes. As far as I can hope."

Luce snarled and turned on his heel, the kitchen suddenly too small to hold him. He only stalked to the door and then stalked back, hands clawed in front of him, but the tension in his skinny frame was so vital and murderous that Conrad had to ask.

"What are you … going to do?"

"Exactly what I've been doin'. Lookin' fer the bastard that tore the poor kid apart. Now I'm just gonna get a lil' more creative when I find the fucker," he rasped. He reached past his fur collar with a busy movement, clearly rummaging for something. "I'll think up shit that'll make 'im beg for equal treatment. They'll hafta drain the port ta find half of 'im and comb through every tree branch for the other bits. But right now? I'm gonna have a fuckin' smoke."

"You don't smoke in my house," Conrad retorted without thinking, surprised by the coldness in his voice. At Luce's angry yet horribly steady stare – Conrad knew he was edging dangerously close to the place where Luce the Person and Luce the Vampire shook hands, a place where only his care for Hanna lay – the coroner gestured back to his bedroom with a wildly shaking hand. He just needed the predator out before he destroyed any more furniture or before his own nerves shook him apart. "I – if you're going to do it, do it on the balcony. Just … get out of my kitchen."

To his half-surprise, Luce only stared at him a second longer before snorting roughly and taking his cigarettes in the direction of the bedroom, strides long and savage. Part of the coroner thought he should follow him, if just for the possibility that Luce might already be burning holes in his comforter to spite him, but he figured what Luce really needed right then was to be alone. He and Luce, both.

Conrad sagged into his dented chair, pushing his fingers into his aching eyes. All at once, he was back in the morgue, smothered by the cavernous silence left after he stopped stuttering, stopped shivering, stopped pushing the awful words out like vomit. The memories came back with a vengeance, sadistically detailed in the stark white light of his mind, as if to spite how long he'd spent trying not to pay attention to them. The look on the Detective's face upon hearing Hanna's diagnosis had almost been too much to bear.

Hanna himself had gone limp and stared at the floor like he wasn't hearing any of it, hands loose over his knees. The older man was strong enough – dedicated enough — to bear it and process it, even if Conrad became increasingly afraid he would have to repeat it all as the man's face became stiffer and stiffer. After he explained it, the morgue was horribly silent. Then the Detective only said one word: how.

To hear his deep voice so blank was horror in and of itself. Telling him was another hell. The bones bore marks of axe strikes. Lack of bruising and elasticity in the skin indicated everything but the stab-wounds occurred post-mortem. And, the strangest, the Y-incision occurred long after death, after the body – after _Hanna_ – had already turned to a dried husk.

Conrad had just begun to tell himself that it was dangerous to get attached to dead people like this when he heard a muffled roar from his left: the direction of the bedroom. Nerves snapping, he jumped to his feet. He heard a door slam with astonishing immediacy and Luce came stalking out, offering no explanation other than a very clear _the fuck is your problem_ look as he swished past and, once again, leaned against the far wall of the kitchen.

Conrad stared at him stupidly for as long as it took him to decide he didn't even care anymore. He snorted and shook his head, moving back towards his half-unpacked grocery bag.

"You've got your fucking information. Go away," he muttered, lumping the scattered avocadoes together and glaring petulantly over his shoulder. His hands shook, a product of his pounding heart. "If vampires can be invited in, you should be able to banish them or something. A real fucking useful safe-switch I bet nobody's thought about."

Luce's only response was a grunt and a dismissive fluff of his collar. He didn't move, but settled in more firmly against the wall, glaring at nothing in particular when really he should have taken wing off of Conrad's balcony – or whatever the non-bat equivalent was for mutant, grounded vampires. Conrad thought about it as hard as he dared. Maybe part of him wanted to be with someone right now, and it was only with the most grudging of understandings that Conrad decided he wouldn't raise a stink about it.

It was just the easiest way to go. Not only would it be impossible to evict his undead tormenter without his consent, he realized (with a bipolar suddenness that nearly made his head spin) the idea of being alone at the moment didn't sit particularly well with him either. He wouldn't be able to go to sleep after saying all of that again, not for a while and certainly not in a goddamn empty house. A cold, obnoxious someone, especially one who _understood_, was better than no one.

Besides, Luce seemed to feed off of his reactions (among other things). If he simply ignored the vampire, he would eventually piss off of his own accord, finding him a boring playmate. Or maybe, just maybe, they could peacefully coexist in the aftermath of a torturous revelation for at least two seconds. Maybe.

With his adrenaline fading, Conrad's crumpled stomach took that opportunity to remind him that he hadn't eaten since five that afternoon. He waited only long enough to put away the rest of his purchases before reaching into the fruit drawer, testing various firmnesses and pulling something out. To begin his campaign of properly ignoring Luce, he took his dinner to the living room, flopped down on his big couch and warmed the peach briefly against his front. He bit down, winced at the cold, chewed a few bites, and then realized that Luce was, against all expectations, still there.

Not only had the vampire not departed in a bored, mentally-disturbed huff, but Luce had actually drifted into the living room after him and was currently staring at him with a blank expression that bordered on creepy with its hidden intensity.

"Yes?" Conrad sneered after he pulled the sticky fruit away, cleaning his lips as inconspicuously as possible. He hardly knew where he was getting all of this antagonistic energy from, but he latched onto it gratefully anyway.

The single syllable seemed to knock Luce out of a haze and, with a disturbing pulleys-and-levers elasticity, his unshaven face became a little more human.

"Looks pretty good," the vampire commented, smirking slowly as he moved around to sit on the arm of Conrad's chair. One needle-thin fang peeked out, a single but effective shard of cheshire cat. "You get that from the organic produce aisle, ten percent ta cherity?"

"Shut up," Conrad said flatly, mind fully changed about interacting.

He was in the bitter mood where it pissed him off to be nitpicked about something as small as his food choices; he felt like the very peach was under scrutiny and held some damning indicator of his faggishness. Screw trying to coexist with the vampire that was certainly not, nor would ever be, his boyfriend: he just wanted to be left alone. He wanted to eat his fucking food and be left alone to be terrified and worry and other shit.

"I wouldn't mind'a bit of it," came Luce's accented drawl from his right, oddly off-handed. Conrad's face scrunched up and he took a big, messy bite just to spite the bastard.

"Well, I'm not feeling generous today, asshole. And shut up, I know vampires can't — "

Then he stopped. Cheek bulging with his own immaturity, Conrad slowly put together the data of the two times Luce had drank from him and then complained about the taste with a perturbing knowledge of his diet — and from the way Luce was staring at the pink-dusted peach, a third time made proof. There was only one conclusion to draw.

"Wait, you mean … so you can taste what I eat?" Conrad gulped and looked at the fuzzy globe, pocked with bite-marks and shining yellow on the inside. It was a literal case of 'you are what you eat or you taste damn close'. He swallowed and cleared his throat. "Eugh."

"Makes drinkin' offa junkies a chore. I got enough second-hand burgers with Lysol ta do me fer life, an that's sayin' somethin. So how 'bout you stuff that thing down and lemme take a bite, and I'll do somethin' nice fer ya," Luce suggested, sly grin now symmetrical and fully predatory.

As strange as it was to see the vampire smiling just minutes after denting his chair and screaming to the moon (stupid fucking distorted immortal sense of time), the realization that Luce was actively _bargaining_ for something he wanted was enough to make the hairs on Conrad's neck stand up. Either he really, really wanted it or it was a joke. A few more seconds of dubious staring eliminated the latter option.

Luce must have liked peaches, or maybe just fresh fruit, back when he was human. It was a thought as strange as it was intriguing.

"Like?" Conrad said after an excruciatingly long pause, face blank as he could make it.

Luce's red eyes flickered to the side, returning to his a superior smirk.

"Not break yer window next time I drop in."

"There's a really big fucking difference between doing something nice and _not_ doing something awful," Conrad grit out disbelievingly, gesturing with the half-eaten peach. "I like my blood, and I want to keep it where it is. You'll have to do better than that."

"Alrigh'. Fine," Luce sniffed. "I'll just git a key an' come in nice and quiet. The one on yer keychain'll do me jus fine."

It was a ridiculous offer, though less ridiculous than the original. It should have been over with a snort and a dismissive wave of Conrad's hand, because the idea of Luce having a key was somehow terrifying on a different level than dealing with his occasional break-ins, but, staring speculatively into Luce's sharp red eyes, Conrad actually found himself thinking it was a good idea.

One little key meant no more broken windows or dented locks. The coroner was, in fact, very grateful that Luce was being so kind and conscientious, and wondered over it all as his head nodded with a peculiar slowness. Yes, he would like to have one more window intact. Maybe he could even teach the vampire the new security code when he got the new system installed, to replace the one that Luce had ripped out.

_Okay_ started to float out of his mouth before Conrad chopped it off with a sharp slap to his forehead, teeth clenched.

"Wait, agh, _fuck_. No! Hold on!" Conrad burst out, rapping his fist against the side of his head in an effort to clear the shivering mental condensation. "You're doing that thing again!"

"What thing?"

Though Luce's scratchy voice never sounded sincere by any stretch of the imagination, one look at the shit-eating grin on his face said he knew exactly what it was.

"You have this … god, you have this _thing_ that makes me want to do what you want me to!" he exploded, gesturing stupidly against the liquefying feeling as Luce watched in definite amusement. He arched a brow and moved away from the chair, then was suddenly standing at Conrad's white-shoed feet.

"S'called I'm a handsome motherfucker." Bending over the couch, Luce pressed closer in a greased movement of his fur-crowned shoulders, and the jittering warmth in Conrad's neck shot up two notches. His red eyes were the brightest things on earth, his voice gravelly and horribly fucking compelling. "Shut up and eat the peach, Connie."

"_No_. Hell no, fuck no, Christ no. I'm not eating anything until you tell me about the fucking eye-thing!" he practically shouted, if just to break the warm haze that was swilling pleasantly under his muscles. As hard as he tried to fight it, it only receded when he squinted his eyes shut and turned forcefully away from the vampire, putting air between them.

When he was sure it had settled and he was left with a low tide on his mental beach, high and dry on firm sand, he risked a glance out of his periphery. When Luce only stared at him, Conrad's face burned and he glared intently at a space a foot to the right of him.

"You used it on me the first night, in the morgue. I'm not fucking crazy. It's like you hypnotize me or something."

"Yeah, an if ye were a lil less of a wimpy whinin' faggot, I wouldn' have ta," Luce muttered, looking very disappointed that this was taking so long and would actually _require_ an explanation to people who cared about their free will. Conrad's mouth popped open.

"I knew it. I _knew_ it." The coroner pointed at him vindictively and waited for Luce to react, if just to the accusation, but he didn't. The vampire merely waited with his arms crossed, expression distinctly bored and impatient. Conrad looked up at him and squinted, trying to make the facts fit. "Wait. So. You can hypnotize people?"

"S'a lotta different names for it, but yeah. S'like a sedative mixed with hormones. Blows the lid on your id. Easy way to quiet people down, make 'em want what you want. S'just basic practice ta never look a vamp in the eyes when they want somethin' from you."

Absorbed with the terrifying concept, Conrad stared up into the vampire's red eyes. He searched their depths and waited for the tingle, the overwhelming yet soundless push in a corner of his ripe brain, but found that he couldn't feel a thing… and Luce was looking at him like he was a royal fuck-up. Re-hearing Luce's warning, Conrad's mouth twitched and stuck somewhere between a wretched grin and a grimace.

"So this is bad form?"

"Yer a fuckin' idiot," Luce said flatly, then pushed away from him with a certain irritation that said he really didn't want a pet if it was going to be this high maintenance. He hadn't signed up for teaching Conrad how to defend himself from other vampires who wanted to make a snack out of him, and he wanted the human to know exactly how annoying his ignorance was.

Conrad huffed, then looked down at the peach, turning it over as he thought it all through. He hefted it in his hand, remembering his sudden want to dig his teeth into it and swallow the sticky yellow flesh. The cloying suggestion had come straight from his gut but there was no do or die edge to it.

"You could make me eat this right now," Conrad clarified after a considerable pause, suddenly looking between the peach and Luce, then sticking on Luce as something solidified in his brain.

"Ain't worth the trouble," Luce said impatiently. "Yer gonna eat it anyways 'cos yer a sorry sob an' yer des'prit fer a fuck."

"But you won't make me _do_ it," Conrad pressed, talking slow and with a pointed emphasis that was obviously pushing Luce into a low grinding rage. "You'll just make me _want_ to do — wait a minute, when did fucking come into this?"

"Eat the peach or I'll leave without fuckin' you into the floor, how bout that?"

For a second all Conrad could do was stare.

Part of him was squawking to have his intelligence respected, to have his questions answered and his inquiries taken seriously and not pawned off on some distraction. It was quickly smothered by the vast majority of lonely, paranoid, touch-starved Conrad, whose electrified eyes were stuck to the suddenly showy angle of Luce's hip against his chair, and the little voice of truth in the back of his head that said, yeah, desperate may have been an understatement. And he was going to eat the peach anyways. It wasn't necessarily giving in, just continuing with a previous course of action.

Or he just really wanted Luce to fuck him and would eat a thousand peaches if it meant it could happen on a regular and reliable basis, preferably without all of the verbal sniping beforehand.

"Well," Conrad said hoarsely, and then realized he didn't have anything to follow it and instead took a huge bite out of the peach to fill his mouth so he didn't say anything stupid.

Luce huffed at him like a dog whose territory was finally cleared of all threats and stepped back to lean against the chair and watch him eat it, like if he didn't keep an eye on him, the idiot human would miss a bite. Despite the rush of disbelieving anticipation, Conrad was feeling a little horribly self-conscious and doubtful by the last few mouthfuls. He carefully averted his eyes as he rolled the pit against his tongue and sucked it clean, then put it on the napkin he always reserved for pits. When he looked back to Luce, he hadn't moved and Conrad was struck with the urge to twiddle his thumbs and say _so how about that incumbent carnality_ or something ridiculous.

"Wait fer it," Luce practically growled and Conrad, reluctantly, did.

Almost ten minutes later, as if some kind of egg-timer had gone off, the vampire suddenly stood up and motioned him up off the couch, shedding his coat in the same movement. Conrad followed, taking two steps before he was _swooshed_ against the side of the couch and all six-something feet of Luce's dense, skinny body was crunched against his, the creature's cold hands cupping his neck.

As much as he hated the word, swooning was just about the only thing he was capable of doing when Luce's lips closed over his neck and his cool fingers dug into his damp hair.

Conrad's hands clapped up over Luce's bony shoulders out of instinct, pulling his silent chest closer. His own chest hitched in a faint whimper when he felt fangs prick at his skin, but not slide deep. Luce's wet mouth fastened over the cuts and Conrad tried not to squirm, taut body twitching at the insistent slither of the vampire's tongue over the tiny wounds.

"Fuck," Luce breathed into the coroner's neck when he broke away, voice gravelly.

He slid his tongue over his lips and against the warm skin and over his needle teeth, making the sweet red glide over his tongue and dribble down his throat. He let it drip, not hurrying it with swallows. Then, eyes closed, he pulled Conrad even closer into the curve of his bony body.

"Shit, tha's good. Fuckin' hell."

Head bowed, Luce licked and sampled with crisp little noises and pricks and tickles that didn't do anything for calming Conrad down, and, for once, Luce was so absorbed that he didn't pull any of his dirty distracting tricks. Luckily (or horribly) Conrad was accustomed enough to the whole routine that he didn't tense up too much when the vampire bit down and abruptly made a fiercely satisfied noise that bordered on orgasmic. Conrad grunted from the splitting pain then sagged against him, vision reeling backwards.

The dislocated feeling of the vampire's claws sinking into his back and kneading at him followed him into the dark place as Luce pulled from him, swapping between greedy gulps and shallow pulls that were peppered with strangely overwhelmed puffs of air against his sweating neck. By the time Conrad came around, he was limp in Luce's arms and the vampire was letting him bleed just enough to swipe it clean with his tongue. He did it again and again, letting the salt and texture of his skin mix with the sweet, tart, firm, _yellowy-orangey-fresh_ taste, mouth never leaving the bite-marks.

The coroner's arm had been caught at an odd angle when he passed out. When it began to tingle, Conrad started chuckling weakly. All of his rational fear of the vampire had bled down to nothing by now (he had long been reduced to a grumpy, sleazy, horribly sexy but strangely moral home-invader in Conrad's mind) and Luce was just so ridiculously _into_ it. Amazingly, Conrad was riding just high enough to make fun of the predator of the night whose fangs were poised above his peach-flavored jugular.

"R-really?" he wheezed, sniggering and letting his head fall back. "This is … really?"

"Shut up," Luce muttered without any steam whatsoever, nearly purring as he pushed close again and lapped up a few more weak threads of blood.

At last, he finished drinking and breathed out, skinny frame relaxing. Shivering from the tiny gust of cool air, Conrad stayed against Luce and slowly placed himself back within his skin and his living room and his life. He felt a bit afraid to move, but that could have been because he was between a warming body and the arm of his couch, and he was pressing back softly as Luce leaned his temple against his. Both of them were silent and breathing and warm and almost genuine and his arms could feel what it felt like to _hold_ someone even through the tingle.

Then Conrad yelled sharply when the vampire grabbed him just under the ass and pushed him over the arm of the couch, flinging his legs into the air.

Conrad's world up-ended, and him along with it. The adrenaline-rush was enough to overload a cow, but the impact was so sudden after the drinking that he found himself incapable of jumping up like his brain demanded. Flat on his back, Conrad lolled there on his couch in the dark and watched the ceiling swim, groaning silently. He simply breathed in and out for a second, feeling every flex of his protective rib-cage around his paper bellows lungs, unable to lift his richly-heavy limbs or to _want_ to open his eyes again once they closed.

When he finally managed to rouse himself after a weird pocket of time, the living room was empty. He looked up, lifted his head. Frowned.

"Luce?" There was no vampire, no coat, no nothing. The TV was off. If there weren't a dull ache in his neck, he would say the whole thing had been a dream. Sitting up, he put his hand to his throat. "Where did you …"

No, a few glances around the corners proved it. The house was unlit and empty. No noises. No life. All at once, Conrad remembered their deal because he had really never forgotten it, and that alone pissed him off. Tricked. Not only tricked, but fooled as well.

That little spark was all that was needed to start the abrupt deluge of abandonment and resentment and suppressed stress and bitter incredulity that forced him off of his couch, fists nearly shaking at his sides. Rage and frustration clearing his head like agent orange, he yelled to the empty house.

"Seriously? God damnit! Are you fucking _serious_, you … unbelievable cancer-blot of an asshole?"

"Dead serious, peaches, if you'll shut up a second."

Conrad spun around and, as a direct result, fell back onto the far side of his couch. He didn't even notice.

Luce was standing in the middle of the hallway that led to his bedroom, naked. One-hundred percent naked, and with a tiny tube in his hand. Conrad couldn't even be mad or amazed that Luce had stripped and managed to disembowel the contents of his bedside drawers in less than two minutes: he was too focused on the very naked man in the middle of his house. It shut him up immediately. Because he was naked.

Very naked.

"Well, if I knew it was this easy ta shut you up…"

Positive he was hearing some kind of echo, Conrad looked up (distinctly up) to find Luce grinning down at him, one brow edging towards his hairline. His pose was David, cock of his hip turned arrogant and sleepy; his craggy nose and cheekbones were chipped from the worst of marble, undercut by an asymmetrical glint of teeth. The light from the kitchen cast his angular body in stark relief, all hip-bones and rocky sternum and stringy tendons, so much so that the artist hiding inside Conrad promptly artgasmed, forcing the coroner to slump back against the back of the couch and push his hand through his ruffled black hair to hide it.

He gulped, a most appropriate and dignified response. Luce's grin only widened.

"You wanna get to it er you wanna put down yer plastic furniture covers firs'?" the vampire mocked him, posture clearly issuing the challenge. The speed with which Conrad reached for his scrubs would have burst the most precise of traffic radars, but in the time it took him to pull his shirt over his head, Luce had _wooshed_ onto his legs. His pale hands were already knotted into his pants; Conrad instantly thanked god for drawstrings.

"Too slow," Luce growled in that gravelly way, except this time the liquefying surge of lust was one-hundred percent Conrad's. He couldn't stop the pathetic sound that jerked out of him when the undead man's warming hands pushed him against the arm of the couch and slid up his naked sides, underneath his turtleneck. It was so much better than the alleyway, just because he had the presence of mind to think about things and expect things and remember them after.

Conrad arched back against the arm of the couch, heart in his throat, then released all that steaming pent-up pressure in a furious squawk when his pants were ripped off of his legs, the two very separate halves flung to the side.

"Fuck! For the love of god, those were expensive!" he yelled, then roared again in pure consternation when Luce yanked him flat like a disobedient fold-up chair. "Wha – what the fucking hell is wrong with you! For a man who has eternity, you can't wait long enough to get to a bed like a civilized person?"

The apparent answer was not only no, but _fuck_ no. Luce made quick work of the rest of his clothes and, subsequently, Conrad's protests: the feeling of the vampire's callused hands scraping down his legs and the sight of Luce bent over his shaking stomach, making satisfyingly quick progress, was more than enough to shut him up again.

Heart pounding, Conrad restricted himself to tense breaths and squirms until the silent living room was split by a ridiculously loud moan – one which he was a little startled to realize was his. It just eked out of him, shaking body caught off-guard by a zing of sensation when Luce bent over him and the vampire's scruffy chin brushed against his naked shoulder.

"Think yer the one who can't wait," Luce cackled, sounding smug enough to kill. Conrad clapped his hand over his mouth, cursing himself, then promptly _hnnngh_ed into his hands when Luce scraped his cheek up his throat and kissed his ear wetly, obviously testing him for a reaction that his twitching body gave in full.

"Fess up," the vampire whispered in his ear, nosing against the fuzz of his sideburn. "How long's it been?"

"Two years," Conrad gulped out and, like a bucket tipped over, he couldn't stop his stupid words. "And it was awful. Not the waiting. Okay the waiting was fucking awful but the sex was even worse."

The instant he said it, he was suddenly Conrad the Fag again, ridiculous and sprawled on his back on a couch, screwing up the most obvious and guaranteed chance at a lay ever gifted to a human being. He was expecting mockery, but Luce's red eyes only narrowed a fraction, then drifted off into an unbearably uninteresting corner, ignoring the heaving stretch of flushed man underneath him. His body was effortlessly motionless, expression almost pensive.

The silence stretched on for another minute and then another until Conrad, nearly rattling with pent up energy and naked neuroses underneath him, blurted out:

"_What_?"

"Tryin' ta remember what a year is," Luce mused blankly, eyes still pinned beyond him. The distance between them stuck in Conrad's sternum and threatened to tire-jack his ribs apart.

"Too fucking long," Conrad gasped out and yanked him against his naked chest and kissed him hard. The vampire remained stiff for only a second, then Luce went along with it after a nip at his lip and a mandatory chuckle at his pathetic state. Everything after was too fast to think about and borderline perfect, which, contrary to Conrad's expectations, didn't so much erase the fact that he was having completely sober, messy sex (with a dead man) on his pristine couch as make it infinitely better and more enjoyable.

Finally, Luce's stick-like limbs gave out and they were laying together, and for once Conrad wasn't wondering what to say.

His brain was blank in a way that could only be described as glorious; his skin tingled with what was left of his brainwaves and the couch was wonderfully scratchy underneath his naked back in a way that said _this is real_. It was enough to lay underneath the vampire and breathe, feel the overwhelming rhythm of sex part into the give and take of their diminishing synchronism. The grate was satisfying and real and Conrad found his hand sifting through the close-chopped fuzz at the back of Luce's neck, breathing in sweat.

As much as he expected it, there was no quick exit afterwards. Three minutes passed, and then seven, and Luce's bony body was still pressed atop his, all angles and white skin. The pressure was beyond comforting, but Conrad hummed in surprise when Luce brazenly shoved his prickly face into his neck. He nuzzled so closely that it would have suffocated anyone else but, not breathing, the vampire was able to extend that breathless moment of an overwhelmed kiss on the neck between lovers into minutes and minutes.

The contact, puzzle-piecey and intimate as it was unexpected, made Conrad's chest swell. As the sensation trickled back into his flushed body, an uncertain, slightly gleeful smile crept over Conrad's face. Even if there was something a little strange about the way Luce was wrapped around him — it had an intentness to it that suggested he was trying to get all bodily contact possible in a way that spoke of pure ratios — he was still _there_. With how tightly he was holding him, with such a lack of self-consciousness, and the way his face was buried in his neck … it was even a little, dare he say it? Cute.

"Bet you think this is cute."

The smile dropped from Conrad's face, accompanied by a prompt mirroring motion in his gut. Could vampires read minds as well as hypnotize people and turn into bats and ruin lives? Luce shuffled yet closer and turned his cheek to the side, so his voice was less muffled.

"Don't take it personal, Connie. I jus' burned a lotta blood. M'fuckin' freezin'. "

"But you just bit me," Conrad protested hazily, feeling strangely insulted that his blood was, what, too watery to keep him full or something. Luce laughed, low and flat.

"Yeah, an' took like two gulps. Takes a lot more'n that ta keep a fang warm. Specially after … aerobics."

With the all-accepting calm that always came post-orgasm, Conrad thought about it and realized that must have been a constant problem with Luce, with as little as he took from people. He was cold all the time, so he appreciated body heat and probably didn't get it very often as per his fucking terrifying appearance. Then the math struck a gong in his head.

"So I'm basically a water-bag for you," Conrad surmised darkly, then frowned further. "That you can drink off of. And fuck."

"Yep. Yer a walkin' vamp terrarium. All the comferts'a home in one lil faggy package. Now all there's left ta do is find th' mute button."

Luce jostled him in a way that would have been teasing and snuggly with anyone else, but it left Conrad frowning sharply, glaring up at the ceiling as he was _rearranged_ to provide maximum body heat. Fuck the vampire. Fuck him to hell.

Still. He was technically being cuddled. Humans liked that. Correction: human bodies like that, even if the brain inside the human was very grumpy and dearly wanted to shove the undead man off of its happy body and pack a clove of garlic into his nose.

"I'm buying nectarines next time," Conrad muttered into Luce's light hair, still ruffling it (albeit a little crossly now) with the tips of his fingers.

"Fuck you an' the horse you rode in on," Luce said sleepily, then yawned widely, rooting deeper into Conrad's warm chest. "Yer a dumbass if ya think that's all it's gonna take ta chase me off."

Conrad should have felt ashamed or stupid at how instantly he smiled, but he was too tired for that (remembering things like self respect took energy) so he just sat back. He closed his eyes and enjoyed both the feeling and the man sprawled across his chest until he fell asleep, arms around Luce's caving white back. Three hours later, he woke up alone, but he still had whatever Luce kept coming back for, which his wistful, injured mind could only hope wasn't just the excruciatingly bad information he was equally bad at relaying.

Conrad's hazy happiness lasted as long as a satisfied yawn and a full-body stretch, then he spotted the irreparable halves of his custom red scrubs on the ground – and his key ring, which was splayed on the ground atop his scrubs and missing not one, but seven keys.

"God – fucking – you – _Luce_!"


	22. On Ghosts

A/N: Yay, real detective work!

I know everyone trembles to hear the term OCs, but rest assured, unless this story takes a screeching left turn somewhere, my plot devices – AHEM, OCs – will last no more than a chapter or two.

Now if you'll scuze me, I'mma go write unZombie a love letter.

Warnings: language, supernatural shenanigans, disturbing imagery, unZombie wumping, so much gay, how so much gay

* * *

On Ghosts

* * *

"… a zombie?"

"Oh, man!" Hanna jumped as if he had forgotten his own green skin, which glowed unripe avocado in the fluorescent light of the apartment landing. Abruptly, the straight, energetic line of his narrow back caved a little: he fidgeted, tucking his bag of tools behind him and shrinking backwards, out of the circle of light. "Yeah. It, uh. Heh. Helps me … get in the mood. Method acting, y'know. Helps me understand the enemy."

Hanna topped off his offering of crunched bravado with a weird gun hand-motion, then wrenched his mouth into a painful-looking grin. The small young woman, still entrenched safely within her doorway, did not look impressed. Her tired gaze was also lingering too long on the stitches on the investigator's cheeks, but Hanna's partner drew it away and caught their newest client's attention with a wide, simple hand-motion.

"I apologize if our methods make you uncomfortable, but I assure you they're effective. I'm Hanna's assistant," he explained, extending his hand. The young woman, pretty and curvaceous with long hay-thick blond hair folded into a black clip, looked up at him, expression caught between dazzled and confused as his lanky gloved hand engulfed hers. "Are you the one who phoned us regarding a possible haunting?"

"Uh. No. Not at all. I think that was my … Dee?" she called into the house without taking her eyes off of them. After a moment, a taller woman – an equally exhausted-looking brunette – poked her head into the doorway and immediately clapped her hand over her mouth.

"What are — Jesus!"

"Excuse us a moment," the blond said tersely, and promptly shut the door in their faces.

The Detective felt the sharp slam hit surprisingly deep in his chest, but he had nothing to worry about: far from stung, Hanna seemed to be happily distracted, humming one of the Moonlighters' new songs (revving up for the concert the following week) and knocking things around in his rucksack. The older man had wondered if it was too soon for a case, but Hanna's enthusiasm had the uncanny habit of always pushing him out the door no matter his doubts. Assured once again, the Detective leaned back against the wall, thin arms crossed, and waited.

After a few minutes of conversation both heated and muffled, the door opened again and the brunette stepped around her friend (who still looked distinctly unimpressed) and stuck out her hand.

"Hi. I'm Dee. The one who … called you." They shook and Hanna thrust his own hand out too, a bit of a dopey smile budding on his face. Dee shook his after a moment's hesitation, her mouth twitching into a grimace (likely at the cool, dry grate of Hanna's palm), then stepped away from the doorway with no small amount of nervousness. "Come in."

Marie, the shorter of the two, was a graduate student who favored sweaters and crossed arms. Dee was a tall, lanky woman with slim jeans and dark wavy hair clipped close to her triple-pierced ears. A white coat hung on the back of the door alluded to her profession. The two had been experiencing trouble with something that displayed significantly ghost-like traits.

Dee led them around the sizeable, utilitarian flat, which was a comforting mix of used and clean-enough, and explained the things they had heard and seen. Neither of them had been sleeping well for two months, disturbed by strange noises and temperature changes that had escalated worryingly over the past two weeks alone. Marie had seen strange shadows and heard soft footsteps. Both had been lured from bed by unexplained luminescence, thinking they had forgotten to shut off the bathroom light, only to walk into a completely dark room. Several times, the door had slammed shut behind them and no amount of banging or door-rattling from the inside would free it.

When they finished their tale, the Detective nodded respectfully and waited. After a few moments of silence, he realized both of their clients were looking at him and not Hanna, as if he were the expert. Stymied, the older man glanced over and frowned immediately: far from drawing stunning conclusions from the information he was given, Hanna was gazing mistily at the two girls, green fingers tangled in the hem of his turtleneck.

"Hanna?"

"Huh?" the zombie mumbled, breaking into a convulsively huge grin when Marie (objectively the prettier of the two, in the Detective's eyes) looked at him dubiously and stepped a little behind Dee. If the young investigator had been alive, his partner had no doubt that Hanna would have been bright red. Sighing softly, he turned to give a _wait one moment_ sign before taking Hanna by the shoulders and steering him (a mostly symbolic) three feet away.

"The sooner we can figure out what's troubling them, the sooner we can stop it," he reminded his partner, putting their backs to the girls. Hanna looked up at him and fairly blasted the older man with his best dewy zombie eyes.

"But … _girls_!"

"Not the type who'd be interested in you, Hanna," he said under his breath, remaining impressively deadpan.

"… 'cos I'm dead?" he nearly whined, shoulders slumped.

For one as observant as Hanna, it was a bit of a shocker that he had missed the single bed.

"Among other things." He put a hand on the young, oblivious zombie's head. "Focus, Hanna. They need our help."

Hanna's dry little chest heaved and emptied in a resigned, flustered sigh, but when he turned around, his hand was to his chin and he was looking around the small apartment with an infinitely sharper gaze.

"Okay, okay. So, uh … You've seen and heard a lot, but have you come into contact with it directly?"

"Only Marie has actually…" the taller woman began, then kneaded at her sleeves and looked hesitantly to her girlfriend. Marie seemed to have to decide on something before facing the two investigators, cherub face solemn.

"It's only really targeted me."

"Targeted?" the Detective clarified, one brow jumping up.

At an encouraging wince from Dee, the pale young woman sighed and pulled up the sleeve of her sweater: underneath was a sprawl of nasty bruises, some ripe and wet-looking, others fading into rotting browns and yellows.

"Holy smokes! It did this to you?" Hanna exclaimed, sounding genuinely surprised.

"I've fallen three times in the past two weeks."

"Bad falls," Dee put in anxiously. "And she's not clumsy. She nearly broke her arm on the bathtub a few days ago."

"Things just get … tossed around. Suddenly, the room is in an upheaval. Pots, drawers, chairs, everything," she explained, exhaustion and disbelief alike creeping into her voice. She gestured to the bedroom. "Even Himuro almost got crushed the last time."

"Himuro?"

"Our cat."

The Detective looked around until he spotted a litter-box by the door, but that was the only sign of a feline resident. Dee pulled an ugly face at the pair of investigators as Marie went off and tsked and chirped dotingly for the cat. She was clearly displeased with either the cat-calling or the cat in general.

"Himuro. That's a … weird name for a cat," Hanna put in, watching Marie's progress across the tiny living room.

"He was actually a present from Dee's aunt."

Yes, from the sour look on Dee's face, that present hadn't sat well with her. At all.

"She moved to Japan on a whim. We named him after the place she said she got him: Himuro-something. It was a mansion, I think. He got his tail crushed the last time I was attacked. It's almost like he can sense it before it happens, too. I hear him growling and then everything goes to hell."

Hanna's brow twitched up into a suspicious expression but cleared the instant Marie gave up her search and rejoined them. Then she pointed upwards, smiling wanly.

"Oh wait, there he is. Silly kitty."

The Detective took an instinctive step back as a deep black shadow bulged over the top of a cabinet, dotted with two hard yellow eyes. A little farther back, a black tail with a white stripe of a bandage swished tensely back and forth so quickly that, for a second, the older man saw double. He hardly realized he was reaching blindly for Hanna's open rucksack when the zombie nudged him in the side.

"What, you don't like cats, Pluto?" Hanna asked, grinning up at him. High above them, the cat bared its tiny needle teeth and whipped around the corner, dropping out of sight; somehow freed, the Detective blinked heavily and pushed his hair back. He frowned up at the place where it had disappeared, muttering something noncommittal, then turned his attention back to their clients.

"Alright, so, we have some facts now. We know it's angry, it's powerful enough to toss pans and it only really attacks you. That seems kinda … personal," Hanna eked out, drumming his fingers together and wincing at Marie. "This could be a stupid question, but do you have any idea what this could be? Or who, maybe?"

The couple traded another uncomfortable look.

"If it's anyone, it's my grandfather," Marie admitted after a moment, fingers knitted tightly at her waist.

"These flats have been here for forever, they've only been renovated recently. Marie's grandfather helped build them originally and took one for his own, then died here," Dee explained, own long fingers busy with her curly hair. "We moved in about a year ago. He was very attached to it, wanted it to stay in the family. Really saw it as a mark of his independence, you know."

"I can't sleep. Neither of us can. But when I do finally drop off, I've been having weird dreams. Most of them are of him. I can't understand him, but he's very angry and I think he wants me to get out of the house," Marie said dully, blue eyes downcast. She took a moment to rub her face, slumping slightly into Dee's tall frame when her girlfriend slipped an arm around her thin shoulders. "He was a … difficult guy. Gentle wasn't exactly a word you'd use to describe him, but I just don't get why this is happening."

Marie pressed her hand over her eyes and let out a shuddering breath, and Dee turned and swept her against her chest without missing a beat, raking her fingers through the smaller woman's blond hair. They murmured back and forth to each other, Dee comforting her girlfriend in husky, firm tones. _I'm just so fucking tired, I can't even think_. _I know, I'm so sorry. I just want this to be over._

Their complete comfort and lack of fear was admirable; the Detective averted his eyes to give them a shred of privacy, but Hanna seemed to have missed the embrace entirely. He was almost glaring at the entrance to the bathroom, where the door stood open.

"When do most of the attacks happen?" the zombie asked after a moment, voice unexpectedly hard.

"When I'm by myself," Marie whispered, separating herself from her girlfriend. "It's always when Dee is at work or running errands."

"By yourself … with the cat?"

"Um. I guess."

Marie glanced up at the Detective, face crinkling with slow confusion. The older man had no answer for her, but Hanna gave a short nod, something obviously clicking in his mind.

"The ghost isn't your problem."

"We have a ghost and it _isn't_ our problem?" Dee said incredulously, mouth falling open.

"Yeah, uh, and you have to leave."

They stared at him. Hanna's luminous blue eyes were locked intensely on the ajar bathroom door as if he wasn't aware of his clients' presence, then looked back at them as though it were a relatively mainstream idea for two young ladies to leave their own house and allow two slightly insane strangers full access to anything they pleased.

"No, really, you have to go," Hanna insisted flatly, shooing them. "Go take a walk or something, there's something I want to … talk about. Wiiiith my partner. Totally, like, logistics, nothing important. About the ghost. Just about the ghost. That's totally your problem. Yeah."

The Detective looked at his partner quizzically and a little sternly: he could feel the couple's rising incredulity behind him. In explanation, Hanna just made a few stifled motions over his shoulder that translated to something completely incomprehensible but still highly urgent (and something which definitely required solitude to speak of), so the Detective did what he thought was best. He led them outside, through a considerable amount of high-pitched demands and expletives.

When he came back, confused didn't even begin to describe what he felt. Part of him even briefly wished for the old Hanna, who was purely incapable of messy deception.

"I just had them lock us in and handed them my wallet as collateral," he said flatly, pulling his gloves tight. "What's going on?"

"Good thinking! We have to make sure it doesn't get away." Hanna ran to the door and, before his partner could do anything, took out a sharpie and drew a shell-like sealing rune on it and popped the cap shut. Hanna watched it flare bright blue and fade down to a navy smolder, sucked into his work all the way down to his checkered toes. When he turned around, the Detective was staring at him expectantly, hands on his hips. That seemed to snap the small zombie back a bit and remind him that he actually had a partner who occasionally needed to be let in on his oft insane-seeming thought processes if he was to know how to proceed with the case.

"Sorry, Milo, I couldn't talk about it with them close. It's not the ghost that's their problem."

"You said that. What is their problem?"

"There's a reason you don't like that cat," Hanna told him, slinging his rucksack off of his shoulder and kneeling around to rummage in it. "I can't believe I didn't see it right off. As far as I can tell, it's a bakeneko. Or a nekomata, if its tail has already split. Nasty stuff. It's an evil cat demon, originates from Japan. Fits all of their sightings."

"And it's … capable of telekinesis?"

"No, but I'll get to that. A bakeneko haunts any house its put into. It messes with people while they're trying to sleep and conjures up these big balls of ghost-fire to lure people places. It feeds off of poison mostly, from small animals and stuff – you can bet if there was a snake problem around here, it's long gone – but also basically sucks the life out of the mistress of the house. And if the host is getting too weak to be tasty, like Marie probably is, they have this really bad habit of eating them alive and shape-shifting into their double. Dee's lucky she decided to call before both of them became kitty-chow."

"So there's a demon cat in that bathroom," the Detective managed to say after a considerable pause, once more struck with how little he knew about the world he lived in. "But what about the ghost? Do you think it's her grandfather?"

Hanna straightened from his rucksack with a leather bag in his hand, raising his chin as if sampling the stale apartment air or straining to hear a sound. He frowned, shaking his head.

"I can definitely feel him. He's here. It feels really old and kinda angry, kinda edgy, so it's gotta be her granddad, but … bakenekos don't have that kind of tossing power and I don't think he's throwing crap around for no good reason."

The Detective began to ask more questions — perhaps the most important question of _and what are we going to do about this_ – but Hanna raised a hand and motioned him towards the bathroom. The older man couldn't miss the switch from thinking-mode to doing-mode and knew the time for words and explanations had passed, so he just followed. The small zombie paused only long enough to toss him the red-inscribed hammer before pressing himself flat to the door and slowly nudging it open.

The bathroom was surprisingly nice, tiled in creams with square skylights and a wide vanity mirror that covered one wall. It must have looked nice in the daytime, but past midnight, the skylights transformed into inverted wells of darkness and the tile appeared pale and sickly with a bone-like texture. The very air seemed sour.

The two investigators slipped in, treading lightly on the cold floor and visually dissecting every well-lit corner, looking for a slither of black. The older man shut the door behind them, which made Hanna jump a foot in the air. The small zombie looked back with a sheepish grin, then stepped into the middle of the bathroom, sharpie flip-flopping precariously between his fingers.

"Hey, kitty-kitty …" Hanna cooed, clearing his throat and patting his leg. "Come on out. I've got some string for you … it's kinda tied up in my arms and stuff, but you can totally give it a shot."

The bathroom stayed utterly silent, a frozen image of two interlocked lives painted in cockeyed toothbrushes and damp towels, until Hanna took a step towards the shower. The white curtain bulged and a flash of black made them both turn sharply. A low, grating yowl issued from the dark space and the sound alone made the Detective's back prickle viciously. The bathroom echoed with an eerie, drawn-out squawk, a whine, and then a short, crisp hiss.

He saw a black tail whip back and forth under the curtain, a thick shadow clinging close behind. Doubling it. The Detective tensed and raised his hammer the moment the lights flickered out, plunging the bathroom into complete darkness.

He made an alarmed noise and looked around in the pitch black, instinctively searching for the rucksack and the flashlight he knew was in there, but he didn't even have time to consider going back for it. The guiding blue headlights of Hanna's eyes were briefly overwhelmed by a flare of bright light. When the older man's vision adjusted, he saw Hanna standing in front of the sink, holding a glowing blue ball of magic, face grim under the opaque sheen of his chunky glasses.

"Sorry, kitty. I'm a little too old for hide and seek, and I'm betting you are, too."

The bathroom's tub and curtains twitched and twisted warily in the silvery shadow of the beacon, but otherwise revealed nothing. The Detective's fingers gripped and re-gripped the handle of the hammer, attempting to fight off the sudden chill underneath his skin – or so he thought. His next tight breath brought a cloud of steam rising in front of his eyes. Mystified, he swiped a hand through it, and through the cleared space his eyes locked on a four-legged shadow against the far wall: a barrel-chested lump that was knotting and doubling up and rising into something distinctly bipedal.

"Hanna, by the window!" he shouted, pointing. Hanna turned, but the shadow had already whipped into the next patch of darkness with a piercing, baby-like squeal that evened out into the most threatening rumble the Detective had ever heard, minus the djinn. It filled the room, dark and rough: the push of it left the older man feeling as though the demon had no corporeal form and could slide over the walls like an oil spill and get behind him.

To his left, Hanna backed up haltingly, his dark, flickering reflection mimicking him. The full-length mirror doubled everything, creating a split-tail world. The Detective edged towards the door, hammer in front of his chest, then froze entirely.

Next to the counter, both too close and far too high for a cat, two huge, glassy yellow eyes burned up at him.

Before he could shout out, Hanna slid in front of him, wet ink on his palm. Throwing the blue ball into the air, the zombie shot a handful of yellow-green blasts into the corner, which lit up the bathroom like a cheap horror house. The Detective recoiled, grabbing for the side of the bathtub as the strobe-effect filleted his senses and scattered them. A snarl ripped through the small room, paired with the chemical stink of burning fur, which made the older man look up. The last of the flashes silhouetted a long, impossibly feral shape as it jumped over Hanna, mouth and eyes gaping yellow, and slammed into the Detective.

The hammer went flying. His head hit the ground with a crack he heard as much as felt, but his hands still shot out and tangled into the sticky fur around the demon's muscled neck, forcing it away from his own with a strangled noise of pure effort.

"Gnnh!"

"Ulrich!"

It was strong; his arms shook violently before he wrenched the huge cat's impossible weight to the side, rolling over and immediately fighting to pin the burly creature to the floor. Aching hands digging into its neck, the Detective leaned down to push his knee into its middle, then reared back with a strangled cry when the bakeneko's paw crashed into his face. All he could feel was the blunt pain of the blow until the blood trickled thickly down his narrow nose and the stripes began to sting atop the ache.

"You've got it! Now grab its tail! I'm sorry, really sorry, but you're doing great! I'm almost done, just give me a few more seconds!"

He looked up long enough to see Hanna swipe up a stick of lipstick and slash a heavy red circle onto the surface of the mirror, then turned his attention back to surviving. He blinked the blood out of his eyes and grabbed downwards without thinking, pushing his face close to the cat's barrel chest to be out of clawing range. The bakeneko yowled angrily and writhed underneath him, big paws slapping down over the back of his neck.

The tail thrashed in and out of his fingers a few times before the Detective felt the fork between the two slithering threads of fur-wrapped bone and couldn't help but grunt in surprise. Then he clamped down hard and the cat-demon shrieked so loudly it was nearly deafening, gouging its claws into his neck. The stinging pain combined with the grating noise and the ache in his head almost made his grip loosen, but Hanna's piercing voice brought him back.

"Okay, okay, I've got it! Can you get it up? You gotta throw it at the mirror, right where I drew the seal!"

It was a battle to get to his knees, but the zombie's partner heaved himself all the way to his feet with a doggedness made ghastly by the blood oozing down his cheeks and neck. The demon struggled and spat against his chest, shredding his orange shirt and grazing the soft skin of his belly. Face twisted in a grimace of pain and exertion, the older man dug his hands into the cat's neck and tail and, with a roar, heaved it at the sloppy circle on the mirror.

Half of him expected the mirror to crack, but there was a terrifying break in inertia where the cat hit the glass without a sound, without a bounce, and stuck there in a tortured sprawl. Something in the air clamped down and the seal burned like a brand. Between the wicked distortion of the floating blue magic ball and the silver film of the mirror, the cat appeared as if it were twisting on a molecular level, sprouting limbs as its head strained wildly, bulging yellow eyes locked upwards.

"Got you," Hanna muttered, jaw clenched. He glanced back at his partner, who was leaning heavily on the bathtub at the end of a trail of bloody handprints, all stark black in the blue light. The zombie turned back to the trapped demon, own eyes flaring angrily. "Oliver's never gonna want to get a cat, because of you. You totally just ruined my Christmas plans. Dick."

The creature's only response was a raspy hiss, which was all Hanna needed to dig out the leather bag, throw a handful of the powder on the mirror and begin muttering under his breath. The demon flickered in the swirls of shadow and light, becoming a blot of black and muscle and fur, knotted around a threatening, grating whine. But the longer it went on, it changed from a cat sound into another sound: a deafening roar that had been hiding underneath the cat sound, out of the range of human comprehension.

The Detective found himself fighting to breathe, pulling away from it through instinct. His empty chest pulsed alarmingly, cold and dangerous. Hanna's mutters rose to fight the steady roar, and the cat's body lost all dimension and became a tangle of black, no texture, just void. Pure emptiness.

He tried to watch but, after only a minute of the exorcism, the wild jittering and flashes of vibration were only a fraction of what he simply couldn't stand.

He ducked under his own arm and shut his eyes tightly until there was a burst of noise too loud to hear and an answering silence too deep to comprehend. He realized he'd been holding his breath when he opened his mouth and air rushed in, relieving his cramping lungs. He twisted around, and his mouth dropped open.

The lights were back on. Hanna was slumped against the counter below the mirror, leather bag clutched between his cockeyed knees, face drawn. Above him, the red of the lipstick seal had been blasted outwards, circling what should have been the dirty, scorched silhouette of a cat. He said 'should have' because very few cats that he knew of had two tails and six legs. Or could be reduced to nothing but a smoking skin by an incantation and a magic seal.

"You're bleeding," Hanna rasped. The Detective thought about it for a moment before pressing two fingers to his numb face; they came back bright red. He shook his head.

"What do we do with the skin?"

"We have to burn it," the zombie said tiredly, already pushing himself to his feet. His partner attempted to follow suit but stumbled, knocking into the wall. The older man was too tired to be surprised at the strength of the dry hands that hooked under his arms and helped him up, Hanna's voice close in his ear. "Purifying salts, incense, the whole kit and kaboodle. Otherwise the banished spirit could find its way back to its skin, and then we'd be in real trouble."

"Why is it," the Detective groaned, realizing he had bumped his head a little harder than he thought when he looked at the buzzing lights and was swept with a sudden and violent urge to vomit, "that no matter how dangerous an encounter we survive, there was always the possibility of it being infinitely worse?"

"It's 'cos we're just lucky," Hanna said with a weak smile, which his partner eventually accepted with shrug and a rousing attempt to stand on his own.

"So Dee's aunt sent the cat to kill Marie," the Detective spoke up a few minutes later. They stopped to regroup and clean up as best they could; unable to bend or use his hands, he sat watching Hanna attempt to unstuck the grisly-looking cat pelt from the bathroom mirror. "And Marie's grandfather was attempting to tell her to get away from the cat. To protect her."

"Yeah, but it got muddled and she thought he wanted her out of the house," Hanna answered over his shoulder, pausing to yank fruitlessly at the very stuck fur. "That happens a lot with ghosts."

"Ghosts can communicate that way?" the older man asked curiously.

"Yeah, absolutely! Ghosts can get into your dreams if they really want to, or just your head. They're just floating balls of energy; they don't really play by the rules. That's what's so creepy about them, honestly. Only problem is, unless they've died _really_ recently, or maybe if they're magic-users and know how to control their energy, they're not really good at communicating.

"Most of its just, like, an emotion or an urge or a wish that can be misinterpreted. They can't really control their emotions. The grandad was probably angry at the cat, angry at the lady in Japan, and that bled into the urgent message of 'get away from the cat' except he forgot to add in the cat part. Honestly, he probably didn't even understand what was happening either. He just reacted and lashed out to protect her. Sensed something bad and went 'Hulk Smash' with the pots and stuff."

Legs split by the side of the lightly bloodied bathtub, the Detective leaned against the wall and looked up at the skylights, lost in thought as he palmed the hammer back and forth between his hands. Lost in his own strange dreams, more precisely. It seemed impossible not to be able to tell the difference between what your own brain generated and what came from outside, from a separate entity. The fact that someone, dead or alive, could invade your head and you wouldn't be aware of it was a little unnerving to him.

Struck by the idea, he thought briefly of the woman with the bright green eyes. She had seemed very real. She seemed almost … inserted or pushed into his dream. A perfectly focused image in a collage of blurry, sensory-smeared photos.

"I hope he's okay."

Hanna's partner looked over. Hanna was sitting on the edge of the counter, the rescued demon pelt in his hands, a bottle of hand-soap suspiciously overturned and half-emptied. His expression was oddly wistful.

"Now that his grandkid's safe, I mean. I hope he knows that he doesn't have to be so freaked out anymore. And maybe that he can … go take a vacation? Get out of the house for a little while? 'Cos, I'm sure having a granddad is great and all, but having a dead one around all the time, always watching, could get a little creepy."

"I'm afraid our authority as paranormal experts runs dry when it comes to giving therapy. I think they will just be grateful that their house is demon-free," the Detective said mildly, fighting his creaking knees to get to his feet. "Let's go get them."

Hanna nodded, then looked down at the sagging, scorch-marked cat skin as if seeming to remember that it was once regarded as a beloved family pet and _not_ a monster (Marie and Dee would have to be informed of that). The zombie took a deep, dreading breath.

"Oh man, how do I keep killing pets?"

In the entryway, the Detective had to mentally count to three and take a deep breath before opening the front door. Both Marie and Dee stood up from their angry crouches by the wall, but the couples' faces dropped in tandem to see the drying blood on the older man's face and shirt. Questions filled the air to a suffocating degree. An insufficient explanation of the ghost activity followed, topped off by a squirming foray into demonology that was only really legitimized by an ashamed presentation of the still-smoking skin of the demon-cat known as Himuro.

The Detective fought to keep his face straight, bracing himself for everything from tears to wild screams. It wasn't surprising, then, that one of the girls began to sob harshly. The surprise lay in the fact that it was Dee who gave air to the first sob, as well as what she followed it with.

"I hated that fucking cat!" she half-screamed, turning to Marie. "I knew something was wrong with it!"

"You can't say that! You just hate cats!" Marie yelled back, voice watery with shock. Her terrified blue eyes locked on the shell of her pet again, lightly freckled face whitening further. The Detective put a hand out, prepared to catch her if she started to totter too extremely.

"But this cat! _This cat_! I bet she made it to hunt you down, or something equally fucked-up. We never should have accepted anything from that woman!"

"Is your aunt a witch or something? Is that why?" Hanna asked tensely. From the alertness in his face, the Detective knew he already had a theory going, and Hanna's own curiosity was as important to him as most anything else. No matter if the immediate problem was solved, there were still questions.

The two looked over at him as if they had forgotten there were other people in the room, then took a tiny step away from each other, the hot air between them abruptly cooling.

"It just … she wasn't very happy with us living together," Marie said quietly, eyes drifting downward. Dee, after a second of hesitation, crossed the one step between them and grabbed the smaller woman's hand, giving it a quick squeeze.

Hanna looked purely confused, raising a finger.

"Huh? Why would she be upset that — _ohhhhhhhhhh_."

The Detective literally couldn't stop himself: he smacked his forehead. Blood splattered further over his shirt. He barely stopped himself from smacking his forehead again.

"Oh. You're those kind of roommates. Those kind of girls who live together. Not the other kind of girls who live together." Hanna blinked, seemed to mentally make the switch, then smiled cheerily. "Okay."

The girls just stared at him awkwardly, a scene that Hanna's partner interrupted fairly brusquely with the second presentation of Himuro's remains, wrapped in a blackened towel from their bathroom. The couple waved it away, adamant that they wanted nothing to do with it. Relieved that he didn't have to actively requisition their pet's corpse from them, the older man gave the skin to Hanna, who bundled it into the rucksack. As smoothly as he could, the Detective brought the conversation back around to services rendered and price bargained upon.

After receiving their payment in his reclaimed wallet (Dee dug in her own pocket and shoved an extra hundred into his open palm, face wet with grateful tears. He gave it back: they would need it to replace the bathroom mirror), they quickly excused themselves. The snap of the apartment door seemed to herald the end of their night proper, leaving them in grand silence, the kind the older man could finally breathe in. The scratches on his face and stomach were already stinging less and the cool air was almost soothing to the pain. The two were walking down the steps and the Detective was feeling almost proud of himself in a quiet way when Hanna, wordless for a grand total of thirty feet, suddenly chuckled to himself. But it was a hollow, disparaging kind of chuckle, making his partner look down.

"Hey, maybe we shouldn't have fried kitty so fast," Hanna said, looking up with a faintly miserable smile. "Thing about bakenekos … Legend says they can reanimate a corpse by jumping over it."

Pleased warmth in his chest condensing into a lump, the Detective simply reached over and looped his scarf around Hanna's neck. He knotted it tight against the sudden blast of cold air that confronted them at the bottom of the stairs. They pushed out onto the street and, as they rounded the corner, the older man felt the signature weight of a small hand hooking onto his trench-coat pocket.

"Thanks, Copernicus," Hanna said under his arm, small and genuine.

"Copernicus?" the older man asked just to ask, hand on the zombie's back.

"Oh, you don't know? He was the guy who taught everyone what the earth revolved around. The sun. Instead of, y'know, the other way around. Heliocentric, I think it was called. It was a really good idea, the right idea, but nobody believed him and when he kept trying to tell them, he got thrown in jail for it. Sucks to see what nobody else does, huh?"

The Detective smiled and they walked home, where Hanna insisted on cleaning the majority of the blood off of his face as the single bathroom bulb buzzed like the center of the galaxy, yellow and bright and all they needed to see by.


	23. Out

A/N: Check-up on our favorite ex-vampire duo. Which I failed to make interesting. Sorry.

I SWEAR THEY WILL HAVE FUN SOMETIME SOON I AM NOT LYING AM I LYING?

Also, a little reminder: Dead of Night contest ends on midnight **January 1st**, and HALLELUJIAH, I actually got up off my butt and made an **AFFnet version** for this story. Look up 'Dead of Night: After Hours' (if you are of age, obviously) and you will find not only the unedited versions of edited chapters but certain extras, like a Lamontelaide chapter that I promised a continuation to :) Have fun!

_Warnings: language, more sad hunting lifestyle facts, implied fun at the end?_

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Out

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Regardless of the combined blare of the bar music and the laughter, Finas could always hear the door open and shut. Like the ice-coated hinge and his neck were one and the same, he never failed to look up when it did. Unknowing of the blue eyes pinned on him, the thirtieth patron of the night entered, a balding man with a green button-down; he looked around nervously and was soon swept away by awaiting friends.

Finas let his head fall, lips pressed tightly together, to await the next click.

Exhaling slowly, the hunter clasped his hands over the top of the bar and settled his considerable weight on the wood. A tepid glass of dark ale sat at his elbow, half-full and a hopeful yardstick of the night; the thick black wool of his tightly buttoned jacket insulated him against noise and offers. The mousy woman three stools down had stopped glancing his way approximately two songs ago. Two songs that detailed separate but surprisingly similar accounts of cheating women, dead dogs and old pickups.

He would ask why they were at a country club, but he knew Cas found them hilarious – and now was the last of times to be questioning Cas' routinely too-questionable forms of pleasure-seeking.

Even when his partner was fast on the way to starting a bar-fight at a pool table, which was a feat in and of itself, the obvious option was to hang back. Finas leaned back to watch Casimiro taunt a stocky 'cowboy' and usher him onto what the older man knew was the next stage of a hustle. He monitored the scene long enough to make sure that his partner loaded the cue-ball, then turned back to the stacked wall of bottled liquor with a deep sigh.

As anyone might have assumed, he did not enjoy clubs. His dislike for them reached beyond his life as a hunter and far into his younger years, where all drinking was conducted at home and in the presence of close friends. This was a noisy alien landscape with no end of pitfalls that stood in the way of silently weathering an evening on a diminutive barstool. In the beginning, certain ladies – mostly the friends of Cas' marks who felt shunned by the handsome boy – had attempted to pull him up from his seat in drunken glee, the rubbery grasp of their hands and their giggles alike setting his teeth on edge.

That was perhaps before he perfected the glower that assured them of his indifference and unwillingness to play along. He was a guardian in this arena, nothing more. It was a token of his affection and dedication to Cas that he was here at all, and the practical danger inherent in crowds for their kind was often the least compelling reason to avoid bars.

In the background, Finas heard Casimiro laugh obnoxiously, heard the soft pap of hands against a leather jacket. It was effortless to see the cock of his shoulders, the sly look on his face. The rakish angle of that orange swath of hair, that devil-may-care grin that somehow stoked men into a frenzy to prove themselves, unknowing of how practiced the boy's long fingers were at snatching money out from under egos.

Casimiro never used magic to cheat, but his skill at slight-of-hand only fed his smugness and gambling addiction alike. Finas was unsure which would become an engorged monster first, but watched the ritual sacrifices (blustering businessmen, grisly bikers) with tired eyes at every outing.

Ever since they had become partners, Cas made a point of dragging the both of them down into some manner of cramped, smoky, noisy social establishment for some 'relaxation'. It still felt – would always feel – like some kind of field-trip or vacation or conspicuous stabilizing effort to mingle with name-brands and work troubles and sports teams and unfaithful wives. The two hunters ventured periodically into the real world for the things they needed to survive on the other side, but their trips were often conducted with more sternness and terse objectivity than a drill run, as if the narrow streets of cafes and grocery stores were in fact the more frightening terrain. It certainly made Finas edgier: the idea of so many people walking around, ignorant, combined with the sheer presence of so many living bodies made him restless and hard-minded. All Finas saw was ignorance, potential danger. Places to hide for those who would take advantage of the former and bring truth to the latter.

Still, Cas needed it. He was young.

To be honest, Finas hurt if he thought on the few times Cas had let slip how alienated he was from the doings of normal young men. The hunter always managed with a strength unexpected of his ego and skinny frame, comparable to that of bamboo, always redistributing stress and weight and bouncing back with an audible crack. Though he never spoke of the events that had isolated him, he had weathered a youth of complete disconnection admirably. Most of his stories were swashbuckling and admittedly humorous, even to someone such as Finas – such as the time he invaded a high-school prom in a stolen suit and made off with the prom queen.

But in the telling, the gold sheen and salty moment of satisfaction, the jaunty victory, was always followed with some unspeakably isolating detail (the threat to call his parents, the quick escape to an alley, the twisted ankle and the long walk back to his car, which he was living out of) that left ashes in the listener's mouth and put Cas right back where he'd been. Alone and unbelonging. Other times, when the stories had no such detail, Finas suspected him of lying in order to assuage his fears – to assure himself and better his own life through his partner's eyes.

Cas loved to lie. There was something wrong with a man, when his favorite hobby was lying. The flamboyant narration gave Finas something to focus on, something to smirk about occasionally, but always the chasm lurked just below their feet, absorbing painful details and leaving chilly silences and gummy, stretched smiles and second glances.

Another near-pitiable skill Cas' youth had hard-wired into his psyche was that of being an expert drinker. He seldom overdid it and never in the presence of those he didn't trust. However, when the rare exception combined with Finas' presence, the results were quietly distressing. Cas wasn't good at censoring himself and wasn't good at speaking with people, so it all came tumbling out and Finas knew everything that most kept hidden. Secrets.

Far behind him, Finas heard the husky giggle of a woman. Taking a guess, the cowboy's wife or girlfriend. True to form, the cowboy snapped with a distinctly stung tone and Cas shouted back. There was a screech – too heavy for a chair but fitting for a pool table – and then a sharp smack, probably a crack to the chin by a hand that had long been worn down to little more than dark knuckles. There was an instant furor. Finas took another sip of his beer.

Though it was one of his own most closely-held secrets, Finas ached for his friend – his companion, his partner and his limping, grinning savior – to escape one day.

Cas seemed to live a charmed life, and was nearly irresistible to those who particularly admired grinning audacity. At this point, he was far more adept than his partner at interacting socially, if only because Finas had chosen to withdraw – but therein lay the pain. For Cas, interacting was yet another permutation of the skill-set that had helped him survive on his own, and sometimes on the streets. People were a subject to him, a practice; he had to know how to charm people. Disarm them, talk them away or in, and Finas could see his ease at manipulating people pour out of him when he chose to turn on 'the switch'.

During stretches of days and days alone with the impetuous hunter, unbroken by so much as a word from a passerby, Finas was forced to see the roughness underneath all of that lacquer and was occasionally flabbergasted by the boy's complete lack of understanding when it came to small things between them: respect, courtesy, the proper track of an argument. Suddenly, it was as if Cas didn't even speak his language, which was mostly maturity, but also genuine communication. The simple fact that Finas would _always be there_, even in the morning, still seemed to escape him upon occaision.

Finas looked back. The fight was already over, if a few blows could constitute a fight. He felt a cursory flicker of annoyance, knowing Cas hadn't held back. The cowboy was crumpled against the far wall with his thick legs spread, probably extending his agony by crushing his hand to his nose. His powdered, jean-skirted Rodeo Barbie was denied her quick exit with the victor by Casimiro's toxic whimsy, which had already taken him in the direction of a thoroughly disarmed-looking young thing at the bar. The bandy young man didn't even stop to put his winnings in his pocket but slapped them down on the bar with a sly grin, turning to order two beers only so he could bring his doey brown eyes (his white deformation was soundly hidden behind a layer of glamour, leave it to Cas to make exceptions for the hair-gel equivalent of magicks) back to hers.

But to one who knew Cas' movements as closely as Finas, every motion was almost mechanical, and all wound too tightly. Cas wasn't really interested in the girl. Finas could tell. Or his partner was vitally distracted, which meant the girl didn't stand a chance against the fever particular to the both of them. Nothing living did.

He didn't want that for Cas. The way he skimmed over the surface of life wasn't lasting, wasn't genuine. He only sucked in as much stinging air-humanity-society-loudness as would let him descend below into silver bullets and new moons again, lungs full but never without a constant burn. He was only able to manage such bravado and execute so many 'one-liners' because he wouldn't be there in the morning. Because it was all a distraction. Finas wanted him to have something difficult and worthwhile and uncomfortable, what he was supposed to have. A life.

To work for people's affection because he wanted it, not as a cover for sneaking out back. To wake up before the sun went down and stop searching for the perfect recipe to remove bloodstains. Even though Cas stoutly insisted that he would never leave hunting, and it was a slim hope that their services would ever not be needed, Finas still found it in himself to hope that, one day, Cas could get out.

Find a woman he loved. Have children.

But now, with a six-year cap, putting down his rifle and sleeping at night just seemed too much to ask.

"What's wrong with you? I thought you liked this place."

Like a show back from a commercial, Cas was at his side with a foaming beer in-hand, leaning jauntily on the bar his partner was hunched over. His eyes were still touching on the girl he had been flirting with, but then fixed on him, honest but far more intense than they should have been. Manic, like every second he didn't answer and Cas lost time on the dance floor was vital. The waxiness of his smile affirmed it, and recognizing that unusual shiver of energy made something solidify in Finas.

"More than most, considering my general disregard for bars," the older hunter said dully into his drink, without thinking much. His chiseled face was blank but two steps from surly. He had self-awareness enough to keep track of himself, though he wasn't an appearance-artist like Cas.

"The hell, man, _seriously_?"

Cas, exasperated, fell forward and smacked his beer glass onto the bar, orangey bangs piecey and dark with sweat. A dangerous glint grew in his matching eyes and, with a shiver of primal heat, brought all the tiny, pale scars on his dark face into focus.

"That was a joke. You know how those work? They're not true, so you laugh at them? Jesus." The young hunter glared at the wall of liquor ahead of them, the tendons in his neck drawn tight as he breathed in stiffly. Grounding himself, or just putting more air between himself and what he wanted to say. "The least you can do is haul your bottom lip up off the floor. You agreed to come."

Diplomatic though his words were (which was strange enough because they never played diplomacy with one another, showing yet again how vitally askew they were in the aftermath of this earthquake) Cas' shadowed face demanded silently, lips thin, how he could possibly find the childishness in him, the utter selfishness, to make his displeasure so open when his partner knew he was capable of such stoicism. It was exhibitionist, almost. The anger in the young man's face was only shaken by the loosening grip on his sadness, all whipped into a manic energy that would fall through at the slightest prod – or failed outreach. After a beat, Cas shook his head and pushed himself away from the bar defiantly.

"You wanna complain about anything, bitch about the beer," Cas threw out peevishly, whipping his glass off the bar so fast some of it slopped onto the floor. He turned and began to walk away, head low, shoulders rounded. Eyes on the wet floor instead of the girl he had forgotten to be interested in.

"I was going to say …" Finas began into his bad beer, which was flat and had been flat since the moment the barkeep poured it.

"You were? Really?" Cas snapped, turning around far too quickly. A loaded gun, safety hatefully jammed into non-operation by a sore thumb. The cresting anger in Cas' posture alone would have frightened a lesser man, but Finas turned around to meet him, expression calm. That froze the boy until he pushed the drink away and put a five on the bar surface – then Cas' lip only curled higher.

"I've had just enough."

"For what?" Cas yelled, disguising the spiteful rise of his hard voice in the yammer of country music and shouted conversations. Slamming his glass onto a nearby table, Cas stepped towards his partner, pushing close to Finas' unresponsive face and jabbing his barrel chest with a knuckling toughness usually reserved only for jokes. "To go home and reorganize your fucking sock drawer, like the fucking hermit you are? To clean your rifle for the fiftieth fucking time and wait for sunrise?"

Mentally reaching for the cool stability of the wooden floor beneath his steel-toed boots, Finas held steady. _You're losing your glamour_, he wanted to say, but there was no one behind him to see the odd-colored steam rising from Cas' bad eye and twisting towards the ceiling. The reappearing milkiness was not enough to condemn his partner's features, but when combined with the uncontrollable anger warping his face, Casimiro became half a monster, jilted and enraged. The strange light paled him, almost pointing his ears and unraveling him under Finas' pale blue eyes, and the older man aimed to stop all of it.

"I was only going to say, I shoot best with a pint in my system. It steadies my hands."

Mouth open, Cas stopped as surely as if he had physically smacked into something, armored fists popping out into defenseless skinny fingers. He stared downwards, once more mismatched and Cas, not knowing what to make of the burly man regarding him so soberly from his barstool. When that man smiled, Cas smiled back like their muscles were one and the same, blinded by the mingled sadness on his older friend's face and the flush of his own disbelief.

"You fuckin' serious?" Cas' voice cracked and he didn't notice. He only cocked his head to get a better angle – to see if a thirty-degree tilt would show him some sort of flaw or weakness in Finas' serious expression, a crack in his own form of glamour. Then he paused, eyes narrowing. "You're not gonna change your mind and backpedal halfway down an alley?"

"I find myself incapable of being indecisive tonight," Finas said quietly. He rose from his stool and pulled his coat tight and locked eyes with his taller partner, feeling the gravity pooling in his throat at the intentness in Cas' face. "It's already midnight. We can't afford to waste our time that way."

Perhaps it was his deep voice or his words, but Cas melted in front of him. His hand fell to the bar as his skinny form wilted with haggard gratefulness for his acceptance of their situation and the re-labeling of what was left: it was no longer _his_ time left, but _their_ time. It gave him an anchor. A reason. Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the bittersweet weakness was gone and Cas was grinning in his face. He clapped Finas on the shoulder, smile white and boyish and grateful.

"Gotta get my coat."

With that, the young hunter turned and ran off, weaving through people like a child self-importantly dodging fire-hydrants and potted plants. Finas marveled woundedly at the fleshy tie between them, stronger and with greater mystery than an umbilical cord. All it took was _his_ willingness to go along with anything and the change in Cas was like someone had flipped a lightswitch in his eyes. He was eager, electrified, which forced Finas to reflect on Cas' care for him and the level of his own unresponsiveness over the past month – maybe even the past year. The way he had effectively left his best friend alone to swallow down his choice and its consequences. Harming him by his simple quietness – and leaving him with what?

As the older hunter could have predicted, Cas left the girl staring after him without another thought. As soon as he was within reach, his wiry arm was tight around Finas' neck, locked in with a gleeful snicker. The playful stranglehold and Cas' brash laugh blended with the vibration of the club then broke out, free and clear, into the night air.

Finally, with the first scrape of real cold wind along their cheeks, Finas felt the young man's stale facade wane. Back in the night, where he had convinced himself he was supposed to be, Cas' arms regained their panther swing and the exhausting manic energy disappeared as he slipped around to the far side of the car, soothed by the fact that he could trust his partner in all things – including seeing past his own wishful deceit. Knotting his scarf high around his throat just to limber up his gloved fingers, Finas watched Cas grin stupidly into the trunk of their car before slamming it down and folding his leggy body into the front seat. Because of everything, despite everything, he couldn't help but smile.

If killing as many vampires as he could before he left this earth was both perverse and destructive, it was also _Cas_, and they both felt it with a singularity rare to two people. As his partner and his closest, only friend, it was Finas' responsibility to make Cas' last days as good – or as worthwhile – as he could. Now was not the time to compare themselves to a wider moral scope, or throw around words like right or wrong or healthy or unhealthy. Those were words for children with families, who went to school and could afford many things Cas could not, including both hope and self-pity.

Finas paused beside the car for a moment, then slid his hand across the top of the old machine, clearing a path through the heavy condensation. Studying the line he had drawn through the moon's reflection, sharp and foggy, he felt for the boundary where the cowboys' world ended and theirs began, then got in and stuck the keys in the ignition. The engine jumped and roared its approval, dashboard lighting up haltingly. Neither of them bothered to turn on the heat; only one button was pushed, and by the end of the road, Cas was half out the window, orangey hair whipping over his face as he howled along to the chipped CD he hadn't let himself hear for a year.

_Take it easy, take it easy, don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy. Lighten up while you still can, don't even try to understand. Just find a place to make your stand._

Finas smiled, realized Cas' music choices weren't entirely unsalvageable, and stepped on the gas hard enough to make the tires squeal and Cas hoot.


	24. Remnants

A/N: Ahaa, it only took me 14 chapters.

:[

(Two chapters? Of course you get two chapters, it's still Christmas time!)

_Warnings: language, stinky plot, sad selkies, oh god Lee I hate your ass so bad no wait really you can be my boyfriend_

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Remnants

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"For Christ's sake, Veser," Lee muttered for the thousandth time, leaning close in the sharp kitchen light and pushing a stray silver hair away from the grisly mess on the teen's forehead. Exasperation radiated from his grim expression and the pinch of his fingers on the wet cloth, now stained in a spectrum of heavy red. Veser winced away, lip curling up over his razorblade teeth.

"I told you, man. I tripped."

In a sense, it was true: he'd tripped up doing a severance charm and sent roughly three pounds of shattered brick wall flying at his head.

He clocked in a good five minutes of unconsciousness from it and woke up with a sheet of blood all down his face. A bit of glamour took care of his walk back and the return home was a pretty familiar scene by now: Lee didn't even gasp, his mouth just went flat and he turned around mid-step for the first-aid kit. Veser thought the guy should be thanking him. If anything ever happened at that office of his, he'd be the most qualified to patch them up. They'd had a lot of practice together, and Lee had a way with butterfly bandages that the half-selkie would never understand.

"You're never this clumsy at home," Lee muttered, more to himself than anyone.

They'd had this midnight conversation way too many times, and Veser's soft snort verified it. The half-selkie's guardian glowered somewhere past the ugly slippery flap of skin on the teenager's forehead, dabbing the last of the blood away. He turned his son's head to inspect the damage, brow wrinkling.

"People are going to think I beat you."

"Like you'd have the guts."

Veser hadn't meant to say it, but it came out anyways, sullen and low. Lee's hands froze on his cheeks, blue eyes going someplace far away with a quickness that pierced the younger man's chest. Veser stayed under that frozen touch, glaring determinedly at the far wall, until Lee's hands slowly dropped from his face.

"Veser." The half-selkie didn't flinch at the deep, empty tone of his name and was damn proud of it. "Why are you being like this?"

"Don't play coy, dude. You know exactly what this is about," Veser told his shoes, glowering at the three bright red spots that had somehow made it onto his green flats.

The small, clean kitchen constricted with an ugly silence, drawn towards the coolness between the two men. Lee stilled himself, took a silent breath and put the bloody rag down and dutifully reached for the first aid kit. He peeled the backings off of the first butterfly bandage, Veser's exacting green eyes pinned on him under the swirl of his silver hair, before he spoke.

"You can act as tough as you want, Ves."

The blankness or uncertainty in his voice proved it was mechanical: even with his near-magical powers of denial, he couldn't hope to pretend that Veser's apathy was anything other than glaringly genuine.

"That doesn't change the fact that your mother was murdered."

"Dude, quit saying _yours_ like she belonged to me or something! She was way more yours and even then, she was just a loaner," Veser snapped out, and somewhere inside himself he was gratified to see Lee's ocean-blue eyes go steely. _That's it, hold up, keep your fucking ears open,_ he grit out inwardly, skin prickling at the small victory.

There were several schisms in his cramped, weird little life, but the one most easily dealt-with was that Lee wasn't his father, not really. He'd always been aware of that, and it actually had less consequences and disappointments than being half of one thing and half of another thing. Lee was just _mostly_ his father, especially in the places that mattered, but that indefinable, bridgeless genetic gap actually turned out to be positive: it left enough room for the luxury and pain of utter scraping honesty between them. Veser told himself he liked it better this way, mostly because he hid enough shit from Lee already. He could at least afford to tell it to him straight everywhere else.

The half-selkie prepped for the next blow of the logic hammer as Lee took his cheek in his big, safe hand and pressed the first bandage onto his head, feathery blond brows drawn.

"All I'm saying is that this is dumb. Really, really fuckin' dumb in a way I can't even deal with."

"It's not hers, Ves," Lee said stiffly, not even bothering to correct him for his language.

"Yeah, and she's not exactly around to care, is she?"

At first, Veser was okay with all of it. At first, he'd just been grateful to see some sort of change in Lee's mood: some level above the quiet soul-crushing mourning march his foster dad had been conducting around the house for the past few days. The half-selkie thought he would never rise above it, just die pining stupidly for his mom, then Lee bucked up and things seemed alright. It only took a day for Veser to realize that he'd taken the hollow he'd carved out in himself, doused it in kerosene and thrown in a match. Lee, a reserved and thoughtful man with a cautious streak a mile wide, was downright manic. Clawed hands and a growing wildness in his long face extended to an inability to finish sentences and extended absences.

At the end of the week, Veser found out why.

"It's not just about her. It's about who she left behind."

"Or it isn't. I dunno what you're trying to prove by going after her pelt, but it'll get you no cash in my bank. I'm serious, I couldn't care less."

In his eyes, even going to the police station to ask after it was ridiculous. They were never going to let him have it. It was active evidence in a murder case that would never be solved, but apparently he'd looked so dismayed that the cops let him in to see it. Veser wished they never had. Selkie pelts were special things: they had untold magical properties and were an ancestral linkage that any seal-fae would be nuts to give up, but Veser would gladly pass in this case. Double-pass, now, considering all the crap that rug had brought on.

The cops took Lee into the back room and showed him the pelt, except that it wasn't Ieda's pelt at all.

To most humans, the two were identical. The cops were none the wiser, but Lee would have seen the lack of sheen, the lack of dark, secret fluidity in the fiber of the opalescent fur. The way it flickered and pulsed in your periphery. Someone had swapped it with a normal seal skin.

Lee went nuts, probably. Made a scene. They kicked him out for being the crazy person that Veser was actually starting to believe he was, and he took a few days to obsess about it before running in and telling Veser everything. Problem was, he was expecting sympathy and an instant helping hand, maybe to avenge the insult to his mother's remains. He was dead wrong.

"Look, you and me both know that's not her pelt — but you're not getting the whole 'freaked out' part of this equation, Lee." Veser leaned forward, highlighter green eyes cold as he pushed his fingers into his palm, trying to snag Lee's attention with movement. "Yeah, it was no accident. Yeah, she was murdered, but whoever knocked her off, they knew what she was and they were serious about it. She _drowned_. The autopsy thing said she _drowned_ and you don't think that's way fucking weird, that a selkie has ever drowned, _ever_? They live in water – that would be like a human choking on air! And you don't think the whole noose-pelt thing was a little exhibitionist? And the fact they came back and re-stole it? Fuck vengeance, man, I don't want anything to do with the guys that killed her."

"I don't either. I just want her pelt back," Lee said in a tone too calm to be real, peeling and prepping the second bandage. The quiet stunk of an emotion clamped down into stillness and just that trapped vibration made Veser's voice shoot up, hands hooked over the edge of his chair.

"What, you think you'll ask nicely and they'll hand it over? Take off your blinders, man. If you go messing around in the stuff she was in, you'll end up on the docks too, and then where the fuck will I be?"

Startled, Lee looked down at him with genuine confusion and Veser's own gaze immediately fell to the floor, back stiffening. Lee reached forward and smoothed the second butterfly bandage to his son's forehead and, before Veser could do a thing, gripped his hunched shoulders with a strength that was both excessive and brittle. Caught under the older man's unblinking stare, Veser huffed and reached up to press absently at the waxy bandages, hiding in the folds of his hood.

"She was in some deep trouble before this happened. I think. She kept calling me to the shoreline and … giving me last words and shit."

Lee's eyes widened as Veser expected them to, but then the stretched expression calcified and a line grew between his brows, an indecipherable and ponderous mixture of the ugliest kind of shock and resentment and, far back in the blue, jealousy. An incredible tightness pulled at him, paling him. A desperation.

"She was on land?" he asked, voice cracking slightly, hands white on his son's shoulders.

"Dude, that's not even the point!" Veser grit out, slapping his patched forehead. Anger bubbled high in his throat and he gestured jerkily at the air, trying to part the sulfurous haze of Lee's confusion and fixation. "She was going crazy! Nuts! I mean, like … if I got what she was saying, she was going to kill someone. And if she couldn't do it, she wanted me to do it for her! If I didn't know any better, I'd say she was turning me into some kind of fucking sleeper cell."

Lee didn't even need to say anything: the glaze of possessiveness was struck through with a hot bolt of _no never_ and Veser wanted to fucking _scream_ and take his broad shoulders and shake him, break through this survival wall of denial he'd build like ice around himself, five feet thick. Irritation and nausea and hatred knotted up inside of him, and the wear and tear of the previous week made it sting like salt-water on gashes.

"You're not even listening to me!" Veser roared, the force of his rage pushing him onto his feet. He hated the slowness with which Lee looked up at him, the utter crevasse of comprehension in his eyes. "You keep saying you wanna do this for me, but I don't want the pelt, _you_ want the pelt! If she couldn't survive against them, you'll last about three seconds and they're gonna _find_ you if you go Scooby-Dooing, okay? These guys are _serious_, Lee, whoever they are, and you need to get with the program and get a little more scared and think if that stupid rug is worth your own neck!"

There should have been a decision. There should have been a differentiation, a choice, a crystalline surge of priority that would lift him out of his claustrophobic insides. But Lee looked forward, and the stagnancy of his expression made the last stone drop into Veser's gut.

"I just want her pelt back." Lee said, hollow voice and blank repetition stilling the black anger in Veser's chest. The pale column of his neck bent as though halved by a rope or a braided pelt, admitting his last surrender to his obsession. "I can follow the ring. The seal. Get into wherever they're hiding it. Take it back. I'm sure they don't even realize what they have. What it means to her family."

Veser listened in growing horror as Lee's voice softened and softened until he was nearly whispering, unnatural certainty giving his body a rigidity only rivaled by rigor-mortis. His strong, young body quivered in a clammy chill, a cloying weakness, far before its time. He put his face in his hand, blue eyes disappearing underneath his lank blond hair with a heavy, stifled breath.

"It's the only thing I have left of her."

Everything that welled up in Veser's throat went straight to the top, and suddenly he couldn't breathe. He was barely able to step around the chair and get away from the bowed blond head of his best friend and the decay burning a circle around him. He stalked to the door and forced his lungs open, hand shaking on the handle.

"Have at it, then," he said with a barely-contained tremble, yanking it open. The sound made Lee look up and something dawned far away in his eyes, but it was nowhere near enough to save either of them. Veser gave him one last look and turned away, grabbing up his backpack. "If you die, don't bother calling. Hope the pelt makes you about as happy as she did."

The door slammed and Lee, once more a father with a coatless son stalking into the night, could do nothing more than sit in his empty house and promise a dead woman something better.


	25. Wanted

A/N: YEEEAAAAH AND THE SHIT GOES DOWN. Man, I like making Conrad's childhood subtly miserable.

I, for one, hope you enjoy this. Like, really enjoy it. Rae and I have probably spent a collective 10 hours freaking out about how well this concept works, and it is a freaky-sexy one indeed. Also baby, thank you for your inestimable wealth of vampire lore! This, just, fft.

You know how Mont said Worth spends a lot of time rolling in the trash for a reason? WELL.

_Warnings: language, hyper-violence, medical gore, gratuitous amounts of Conrad wumping, HALLOWEEEEEN oh god watch out for that Halloween (hey look, you guys finally know what date it is!)_

* * *

Wanted

* * *

Wednesday night under a nearly full moon, Conrad spent his walk home glancing in every alley on the way, hands balled in his coat pockets.

For once it wasn't due to paranoia – or, rather, it was a more palatable and functional form of paranoia. After a month of being periodically harassed by Luce, Conrad realized the harassment was just that: periodical. Now capable of accepting that it was happening (anyone who had as many fang-marks as he did would be downright insane not to), he was beginning to get a sense of Luce's schedule. A brief inspection of an updated Red Cross blood-loss-to-regeneration-time website set it in stone, and though part of him preferred not to think that the vampire was waiting a week for his blood to fill back up, the other part of him was pervertedly touched by the undead dick's consideration.

Or maybe anemia just tasted bad. There were always two ways to think about everything Luce did. That said, the asshole was also a few days overdue and Conrad had made the executive decision that he wasn't going to be surprised when he showed up … if he did show up. The preternatural quiet of both Monday and Tuesday night seemed to vote against the very idea, leaving Conrad more alone than usual simply because he was expecting someone.

Conrad didn't like the sensation of facing up to the growing mental tidal-wave of _just an informant_, so he did some truly impressive work that night and moved at least eight bodies out of the morgue just to focus on something simple. He left tired at three a.m. and was navigating his way through the silent black streets of the city, wincing against the occasional piercing gust of frigid air. It was uncommonly frigid, even for a stereotypical, claustrophobic east-coast town such as his where the narrow alleyways funneled bursts of cold wind into gut-wrenching temperature projectiles.

Conrad shivered and bundled his scarf higher around his neck, grimacing; anyone might have thought it was the depth of December if the stark concrete niches of the old city hadn't been pockmarked with fronds of hay and pumpkins and the occasional kitschy paper skeleton twisting drunkenly in the wind.

It was four days till Halloween, and those that got into it, got into it. Ghost-shaped lights winked in windows 'til all hours of the morning and orangey fall wreathes adorned all shapes and sized of doors. Conrad's own condo was neat and bare as ever, thank you. He had never really liked Halloween, which was a little unfortunate considering how it seemed hell-bent on happening every day that year.

It wasn't just the overwhelming amount of clunky orange and black kitsch that insulted his gay sensibilities. The holiday never seemed to apply to him. He remembered being led out under a sheet a few times as a very young child; remembered two roughly-cut eyeholes jerking with each tiny tennis-shoe step, the tear-drop windows of a spooky world catching on his eyelashes and sliding down his face until everything was white and scratchy, only allowing the sound of his parents arguing in.

He was bad at getting candy, the neighborhood he lived in was even worse at giving it, and the next year's relocation to a 'safe trick-or-treating' event found him shuffling between hokey booths in the middle-school gym. He had held his plastic pumpkin out as a prisoner displays cuffed wrists, head down. After they returned home, his mother's fearful requisition of anything containing chocolate (there had been a rumor of a recall, only for Mars candy but who could be sure?) cemented his mumbled _no thanks_ when it came up the next year. That was it.

The holiday soon turned into a cool phlegmy lump of discontent in his young life, something to wince and turn away from. He was jealous of the kids with their cool costumes – the kids with their cool parents and cool brothers and sisters who all seemed to like being together no matter how cold it was outside – with a simplicity of emotion that never quite left him. He hated to think his creepy profession was the cause of repressed Halloween trauma, but it also seemed like one of the least crazy things anyone had said all year. If he were to go out trick-or-treating now, he would probably get arrested for assault and battery if anybody's costume was too convincing.

The coroner frowned at some jack-o-lanterns lining the concrete stairway to an apartment complex, eyes catching on the obvious gaps in the spooky-faced line-up. Their unlucky brethren had been smashed to slices of glossy orange shell and hairy guts and smeared down the steps, damp pale meat glistening in the porch lamp. The product of a baseball bat and hormones and a dash of social unrest. Kids. Punks.

Conrad hitched his coat higher around his neck and walked a little faster. He wished he had someone to walk with him. He also wished that his first thought wasn't about how quickly Luce would just eat someone if they tried to come after him with a baseball bat. He smirked a little. Or maybe he would just stalk them for the rest of their life and become their best friend once they came of age.

Any way he looked at it, the man – vampire – was unimaginably fucked up.

Perhaps because of how empty the streets were, Conrad caught himself chuckling and shaking his head. Whatever worked for them, assuming it did work. At least Luce hadn't picked a punk or a psychopath to foist his thorny affections on, and those same affections hadn't permanently compromised Lamont's sanity. Wondering over the dynamic and the years between the two men, Conrad's smirk drifted into a frown. He was in the middle of a sudden and uncomfortable thought train (which culminated in the unexpectedly relieving fact that if Lamont Toucey didn't want Luce near his neck, he was almost certainly barred from his belt-line) when he turned a corner and something pale caught his eye.

Conrad stopped in the middle of the silent sidewalk and squinted through the rising steam of his breath, pushing his glasses up his nose.

Twenty paces away, a bit of early-morning fog had settled under a tall streetlamp's decorative base. It wouldn't have been so strange had the rest of the street and the rest of his walk been completely devoid of fog. The visible length of the street was bare and dark, scraped clean of anything except the glitter of concrete. Skin prickling, Conrad glanced around nervously, suddenly reminded of the pitch-black sky above him and the sallow moon at his back.

There was a complex translucency to the fog that tricked his eyes, made him reluctant to walk into it or past it or near it. The lamps farther down the street shone through it, or so he thought, until he realized that two orangey lights were shifting with the fog with a disturbing viscosity, like yolks bobbing in a pool of egg-white. He stared blankly, trying to figure out the twists of milky layers as thoughts of crossing the street and sprinting home slowly drained from his mind.

Before he could, the fog unwound itself from the spool of the lamp and drifted off to the left, into the blackened mouth of an alley. The hidden chill rose under Conrad's skin, flash-freezing him down to his bones, then abruptly misted into the cold night. As if a white tendril had snuck around his ankle and tugged, he stepped forward just enough to watch it leave. Then it winked at him.

The winking light in the fog, drifting around the corner, made him feel curious. So very curious. His skin prickled and, abruptly, he couldn't feel his skin at all.

Before he knew it, Conrad was walking along after it, trailing his hands over the brick walls to keep himself on the ground, taking each step as if he were on stilts. It felt as though he were feeding the white wisps of his breath to the presence sliding ahead of him, or that it was gently teasing them out of him like a spinning wheel. Something hooked into his deflating lungs and dragged him along, away from the street and its row of yellow lights, soft and interesting and completely devoid of fear or anything at all.

He went into an alley. Far into an alley, into the catacombs he had never dared venture, each time lured around a corner by an almost playful ringlet of fog.

A year later, Conrad turned a corner, gloved hand sliding high on the brick, and the whole city seemed to freeze around him in an icy wood-print of shadows. At the end of a dead-end alley stood a tall shape. A man.

The figure stood just far enough from a security bulb to be reduced to a column of heavy, damaged fabric and just close enough that, when he raised his head from the depths of his voluminous hood, two round blue lenses caught a glaring flash of yellow.

"Doctor Achenleck." His voice carried clearly through the freezing air between them, despite the clean white strips of fabric cocooning the bottom half of his face. He raised his hand, producing a loud leathery creak. "I mean you no harm."

Clutched in a glove, half-hidden by a fold of his tattered jacket, was a thick, antique pistol.

Conrad's brain saw it, registered the crescent complexity of the safety and the trigger. He took a step backwards, eyes dry and wide, but it was too small. It was only when a white wisp — the fog — snaked behind the man's broad leathery shoulders and reared what was suddenly a peaked, rat-like face with two glinting orange eyes that the rest of Conrad's breath melted from the crystals in his chest and he gasped it out, turned and ran.

The old brick hallways around him had become a catacomb of dumpsters and drainage pipes, and he couldn't remember how he had gotten there. That fact made his chest crunch up like a soda-can, made him stumble and crack his shoulders on the walls as he turned one corner, then two, panting. He couldn't hear anything through the rasp of his own breath or see anything past the visual scrape of black brick walls, but he could feel the silence behind him like a void sucking at his ankles, broken only by the lightest of scrapes. Conrad could almost feel the cold blue air flowing around the billowing weight of heavy leather, twisting and snapping soundlessly, movements too quick to be human.

He made it halfway down the widest of corridors before the silence ended with a shocking bang.

Conrad's body went limp as his leg was blown away, except that the flesh and the bone was still there: everything was still there, save for a precise hole that burned white-hot. The pain paralyzed him so completely that he couldn't scream as he hit the ground, face slamming into cold prickling concrete. Sensation shockwaved through him, streaking from his jaw and his leg and crashing in his gut, fraying his nervous system. His consciousness flickered and failed to blow out and then left him torn and exposed, a stiff bones-and-skin weight on the ground.

Throat too tight to breathe, he lashed out with his arms as he heard footsteps approaching from impossibly far away. Then a hand fastened around his ankle and lifted him sideways. His vision jerked; the jolt brought his bleeding leg twisting against the ground and agony lanced up his knee and side and brainstem and he arched violently, gasping.

His blunt gloved fingertips scrabbled at the concrete as he was dragged over the ground for minutes and minutes, shoe skittering from side to side, leaving red fishtails quickly absorbed into a coating of sewage water. By the time the man threw his leg down, he was already shaking in anguish, bringing his hands in front of his stinging face to protect himself or curl into the ground and disappear.

He moaned brokenly when the man shoved them down and a sudden pressure across his chest (a knee) forced a pained grunt from his throat, overloading his constricted brain. The man's wrapped face was inches from his own, bringing his panic raging into the base of his skull. A chemical smell rushed his senses, familiar and toxically strong.

"Doctor Conrad Dillon Achenleck."

The man's voice was deep and sharp, yet inexplicably distant. Cold and packaged into dangerously even syllables. A bolt of new terror ripped through Conrad's liquidy gut as his hunter took a raspy breath, sending the chemical smell into the air again.

"Twenty-seven. Homosexual. Employed as assistant coroner at a local police station. Hobbies include sketching and cooking. Born and raised in the city. Strained relationship with separated parents."

Conrad's face was too numb to feel the leather finger that forced itself under his lip and against his gums but his eyes strained upwards in fear, breath puffing furiously through his reddened nose. The man with the heavy brass goggles looked into his face, head cocking to the side in an oddly mechanical, quizzical gesture.

"Human."

About the time he tasted leather and blood and bleach, Conrad realized he was whimpering around the finger in his mouth. Stupid things, brainless things that were true but didn't relate to the situation in any way. Absolving shit like _please don't know I haven't done anything wrong please get off of me please please stop I don't know you I'm innocent_. Panic overcoming fear, Conrad tried to twist away and the man pinned him calmly, grip firm even as it was suffocated by the layers and layers of fabric.

"You ran," the man said in the same even tone. "It was unnecessary. However, I will release you as soon as you give me the information I require. You will note that, considering the severity of your wound, it would be wisest to comply quickly to minimize risk of infection."

The big technical rat-tat-tatting words dissolved into nonsense syllables in Conrad's head, making him swallow hard and fast as he tried to find his own.

"What — what do you —" he croaked out, disbelieving of the very ground under his aching head, but the man pressed him into it curtly.

"You will tell me the location of the vampire known as Luce Darnall Worth."

"Wh-what? Luce?"

The name almost made no sense to him. Then: pale skin, fangs, puffs of fur. Luce Worth. He fought to hold onto the concept of the vampire, mind reeling too violently to cope.

"I … I don't know where Luce is. I don't. I don't. I-I've never known, he's never told me," he chanted with weak breaths, voice winding higher as the pain in him rose then spiked to unbearable as a hand came down on his leg and forced it straight. He cried out hoarsely, head snapping back. "Please don't hurt me, fuck, _please don't kill me_—"

"Your unnatural involvement with his kind—"

Conrad gagged and twisted away as much as he could when two hard leather fingers jabbed into his neck, where two starry scars sat under his jaw.

"—may be only the beginning of why you will burn, Doctor Achenleck. You are a sodomist and a heretic. But I hold no ill will towards you. This is a professional calling. I am giving you the closest to deliverance you may ever receive. If you answer me and fulfill this purpose, mercy may be taken on your soul."

The man waited above him and Conrad could do no more than try to take the pain clawing its way up his spine and the sweat trickling down his neck, head twisting from side to side.

"If you answer me, God will not be the only one to spare you further agony," the hunter finished in an awful monotone, blank goggles shining in Conrad's face.

When Conrad could do nothing more than gasp and pant, ground down to a knot of pain, the man moved off of his chest and reached down. Conrad shrieked as a splitting sensation lanced up his leg, the product of the man's fat gloved thumb jabbing into the bullet-hole and _twisting_. He felt the fragile bow of his fibula slither to the side, felt the ball-and-socket pull in his red knee. He felt the grate of seams on flapping grizzled tissue and the pulse of the red-slicked tear, and his stomach heaved violently, pulling away from the unimaginable pain.

His cry petered off then jerked back into a wretched scream, so hard and loud he could feel the blood fill his face and clog his veined neck, prickling. The man's hand slammed his chest flat to the ground, keeping him still.

"No, no, god! Please stop, please!"

He was screaming now, keening, and saliva was pooling around his numb tongue and edging towards his cinched throat. His jaw shook, locked open. His fingers were clawed around the man's arm so hard they hurt even as the agony in his leg sucked all sensation towards it, leaving his hands dumb and cold. He couldn't breathe, with the noise pushing out of him like vomit and the sickening bleach smell pushing in. Couldn't see why this was happening, couldn't see anything.

"You will tell me the location of the vampire known as Luce Darnall Worth," the man repeated above him, voice terrifyingly close, now with a faint edge of urgency or anger. The hand on his chest dug in, pushing him flat to the concrete and making his ribs creak. "You have allowed him to violate you six times. He has entered your home. You know where he is, or where he is likely to be. Answer me and this will end."

The finger jabbed deeper and Conrad was suddenly screaming for Luce, yelling his name shrilly to the band of night sky above him. Begging him to come and save him, he was always there, why wasn't he there now? Conrad couldn't think about the police and why no one was running towards such primal sounds: he was not in their world anymore, nor they in his. He was alone.

Voice cracking, he should have called for the Detective or Hanna but he screamed for Luce, desperate for a white coat and skinny-strong limbs to tear the weight off of him. Conrad called until his breath ran out and then sensation began to retreat from his brittle limbs, bringing the cold in harder and faster than before. His vision had begun to dim when, dislocated, he heard something slam into the body above him and stinging air and bruises replaced the hands.

"Piss off, ya fuckin' sop!"

Something struck the closest wall, followed by a brief struggle. Under the low roar, Conrad heard the shuff of a coat flaring, the thump of two shoes hitting the top of a dumpster. Eyes flickering open, he turned weakly towards the sounds. His heart jumped haltingly to hear a dangerous growl, guttural and familiar.

"Nothin you'd want with him, Abby. He ain't yer type. Not near enough bite to 'im."

To his left, almost too high to see, the hem of a scummy white coat hung off of the side of a closed dumpster. Conrad breathed out hard and fast, quickly overcome by the convulsion of relief and the blurry burn in his eyes. It forced him flat to the ground.

He was afraid to say the name, even in his head.

"Worth. I was certain I smelled you."

The man's voice came from somewhere to his left and Conrad curled instinctively, dragging his bleeding leg closer to his chest.

"Le's skip the hygiene cracks, Hellsing. We known each other too long fer that. Where d'you get off packin' lead into pedestrians?"

"Incorrect. Pedestrian implies a lack of involvement. This man is a most calculated product of circumstance and favor and a curious divergence from your habits. You alone should know what a rare opportunity he presented to me."

A scrape of shoes, the sound of leather falling straight.

"Fortunately, you are sloppy and indiscriminate in all things."

"Aw, you still talk so sweet. Thought you'd lost it, love." Luce chuckled high above him, the spiteful sound of a car back-firing. "What brings ya ta this armpit of a city? I had ya pinned fer a California boy."

"Many things called me here, most of which a degenerate could not hope to understand. Too fortunate, that I should be able to secure your filthy skin after dispelling the situation here."

"Ah, Abby, ta get that ye'd hafta touch me," Luce nearly sing-songed, smug. Far below on the ground, Conrad heard the tinny sound of something tapping idly against a brick wall. "But I gotta say, m'hurt. When'd I get knocked down ta second place in yer kill-list? I thought I had a special place in yer chest-hole, bein' yer personal fuck-up and all. Er was it just lust?"

"When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, sacrifices must be made. My calling here only delayed your death, never replaced it."

"Ooh, is the apocalypse finally here? Fer real this time? You been waitin' on that fer a good long while. You must feel like a kid at Christmas."

"Your heresy will not be tolerated," the man hissed, tone sharpened by a cagey flap of leather.

"Won't it, now?" Luce's voice came wanderingly from above, impossibly confident. "I gotcher toy, Abby. You come any closer er mess with that blood-bag at yer feet and I'll give you a big wet kiss. Yer delicately fucked, as the sayin' goes, an' I wanna know somethin', now that we're stoppin' ta talk fer the first time. How come you've been trackin' me like a dog when all the good sires're out there skippin' round in the moonlight, suckin' down humans like juice-boxes an' makin' babies? This is a regular vamp metropolis fer the big guys and yannoe I've always been a roach compared ta those blokes. Can't even lift a car – ya do know what a car is, right?"

The alleyway was silent again, dense air hanging like pressurized gas: the curt snap of a safety created a spark that nearly set it on fire.

"This won' kill ya, but me spittin' in the wound just might. I'd speak up."

"You are a different kind of difficulty. A rare disease I must address personally before battling the source of all illness."

The man's voice radiated an immeasurable coldness, a fervency made somehow more potent by the restrictive calm of his tone. A low grunt from Luce prompted him further.

"I would say you underestimate your own importance, but yours is a wretched kind of harbinger. A perversion of a perversion, a break in the structure of evil. I will stop at nothing to eliminate you before you can spread your contaminant."

"Oh, that what all'a this is about? I could tell ya I ain't plannin' on havin kids anytime soon … ain't exactly the parent type, kin barely take care'a myself. Then 'gain, don't think that'd change your mind. After all, there's so much more standin' between us. Like how I don' clean behind my ears, fer instance."

"On your feet, abomination. Weapons are secondary to faith."

Conrad heard the click of a pistol and the creak of wood and struggled to make a noise, but his throat was sealed, his limbs too heavy to lift. The roar rose in his ears, where it had been lurking since he stopped being able to scream. He felt himself being dragged under by the emptiness in his leg, and fought against it, because Luce was so close.

"Didn't think so," the vampire grit out above him, then made what sounded like a sigh. "Alright, you've been waitin on it long enough. One more thing, though. How 'bout a toast, 'fore we get after it?"

There was a thick slicing noise and it could have been Conrad's battered imagination, but the alleyway was suddenly the quietest place on earth. In the dark of his own lids, it felt like the depths of a cave so far away from light and sound that insanity wasn't far behind. Something dripped onto metal, echoing, and Luce chuckled in a way that could only be described as sly.

"Aw. Ya don' look excited, puppy. Thought maybe ye'd wanna drink me dry like everyone else. Here I was bein' generous … but this scares ya, doesn't it?"

"Death robbed me of fear," the man grit out, low and harsh.

"Nope. I kin see it. This scares ya shitless," Luce drawled, chuckling again. Several more slicing noises wettened the frigid air. Conrad heard the man draw back with a scrape of his boot, heard him breathe in sharply. "But I guess death robbed ya 'a that, too."

"You are flouting God."

"An you fucked with the wrong guy from the very beginnin'," Luce answered in a growl so ripe with rage that Conrad's chest froze up. He turned his head to the side just in time to be bombarded with a rush of noises that ended in the cold slap of thrown liquid, a snarl and the sound of a body being dashed against a wall.

"Catch!"

The last thing Conrad heard was the sound of thousands of tiny hard things crashing to the floor, scattering and bouncing underneath a monstrous roar so furious it shook the floor and blotted out every other sound. He recoiled inside his cold mind, reaching for the lurking blackness. He felt what he hoped was two stick-thin arms shoving underneath his limp legs, then agony shorted out his every molecule and he bled out in the darkness, that roar still rumbling on beneath his skin.

* * *

Waking up was a slow process of crawling onto a grey plane without arms or legs.

It was hours or minutes before he remembered his body. The first thing Conrad did when he got control of his face was frown into his condensing senses and, after a moment, try to turn to the side. The second thing he did was shout in pain, even if it came out as little more than a wretched moan because he couldn't open his mouth fast enough.

All at once, he felt the fabric underneath his hands and the warm air, compounded by the heaviness of his body, and all of it together sent him into a silent panic until something slapped him loosely on the arm.

"Aw, quit yer belly-achin. If y'got enough blood ta whine, you'll live."

Conrad opened his dry eyes and looked down his chest, which was shaking with his unsteady breaths. He was in his bedroom. His dry, warm, closed bedroom. A yellowish, skinny form was hunched above his feet, glowing in the light of his bedside table.

After fumbling to his right, the coroner's hand fell on the cool plastic rims of his glasses and, with the addition of a thick layer of glass, Luce's naked torso condensed into sharp lines, thousands of scars still hatching his sallow skin.

His collarbone looked like a wound, it was so deeply dug into the clay of his chest. He was covered in blood. He looked distinctly unhappy.

"Luce," Conrad whispered, relief too intense to feel rolling through his aching body.

"Mornin', peaches," Luce mumbled dully around a pair of scissors, red eyes fixed on something near Conrad's feet. Conrad followed his gaze and his face fell, mind refusing to believe there was so much blood on his bed. His denial was encouraged by the glossy crinkle of his comforter, which he followed until it ended in a chain of busted rings to his right. His shower-guard. He was on his back, bleeding onto his shower-guard, which Luce had ripped off and put under him.

'Nausea' wasn't even close to the rotten sensation that bloomed in his gut at the sight of so much wet, fresh blood.

At Luce's elbow was what could only be described as a kit. A kit composed of kitchen knives and a knife-sharpener, the peroxide Conrad always kept in the cabinet, and was that a pair of _tweezers_? His vision weaved to see red smeared down the silvery, perfectly maintained blade of his curved fish-knife.

_Don't be sick, don't be sick._

"What was — what was that?" he choked out, turning away from the gore. His bedroom was suddenly an alien landscape, a haunting cave as unrecognizable as the fish-knife with blood suspended above his precious comforter in droplets and dribbles and perfect plastic shower-splash beads. "Oh god, what was all that?"

"That was Abner Vanslyk. Congrats fer survivin' a date with the craziest vamp on earth."

Conrad stared blankly at the sharp shadows of Worth's wiry shoulders as the dead man abruptly ripped out a length of ace tape (the sound made Conrad's heart punch his lungs and all three organs made a mad scramble for his throat) and snipped it with his teeth. He watched uncomprehendingly as Luce wrapped it around the handle of his delicate trimming scissors and pressed it flat, then _heard_.

"He was? A vampire? But he was hunting you! And said —"

"He's a fang who hunts other fangs," Luce cut him off, inspecting the scissors. "Or a psycho hunter who just so happened ta get turned and didn' see any reason why that should mess with his night-job."

Conrad struggled to understand, but was overwhelmed by the separate struggle to remember. His memory was contaminated with pain, a disruptive virus in his normally expert code of memories. Even then, the things he recalled most clearly were the hardness of the concrete beneath his back and the nauseating scent of bleach, not things he wanted to flash back to at that moment.

"How?" he asked weakly, not knowing what he expected. Luce looked up at him with a vaguely annoyed expression before bending forward and digging the small scissors into the blackened fabric of his blood-soaked pants, snipping brusquely up the side.

"All I got's hearsay, but he was the best around. Legend. The real Van Hellsing doin' God's work, figger. Then some sadistic fucker — eh, can't say sadistic. Abner offed his whole clan and he wanted revenge. He went nuts, turned Abner himself. Figured it was all he deserved and that he'd go insane himself and 'probly jump on a stake 'cos he hated vamps so fuckin' bad."

Conrad hissed and recoiled when the vampire lifted his knee up enough to cut under it, peeling the sticky fabric away from his suddenly cold leg. The scissors, red with blood, clanked back into his kit. The vampire took a moment to sniff around the injury and yet another to poke at the shreds of Conrad's pant-leg, making the coroner grimace and catch his breath.

"Thing is, he went insane. Then he came back to the surface and figured he'd keep doing what he'd always done. Drains a good portion of the vamps he kills, too, when he's not experimentin' on 'em, which is a big fuck-all no-no. So now he's a super-strong immortal fucker out fer the rest of our skins."

With no warning, Luce reached in and ripped off the fabric around the clotted wound in one great snap: Conrad cursed sharply, but Luce didn't seem to hear or react. He just stared at the black-red mess on the other side of the soaked fabric, scruffy face almost pensive.

"Great plannin, that."

It took a minute for the sting to fade, and another for Conrad to look hesitantly at the gelatinous pock-mark in the taut white skin of his calf, cold blood beading all around, before he realized he didn't want to. It was, in fact, the last thing he wanted to do at that moment. It required realizing that he had been shot.

"He eats other vampires?" he asked hoarsely, trying not to shiver or think too clearly.

"Yeah. Makes 'im stronger. An he thinks he's there ta protect humans, not eat 'em. Word says he's been alive for the good part ovva millennia and never once bit a human. That alone'd drive you insane. Think hate and habit're the only things keepin' him alive."

"What was that smell? Was that – "

"Bleach."

"Bleach?"

"An' before that it was lye."

Luce was starting to get cross. Conrad could tell from the grate of his voice, which had descended into a terse growl, but he could also hear anger in it. Anger that possibly wasn't directed at him or the bullet-wound he was staring at so intently. Tension was crawling up the skinny vampire's spine, lip slowly curling back from his teeth.

"Fucker bathes in it, practically gargles with it. That mummy-job on his face is cos he's a wacko germaphobe but he does it to keep from smellin' blood, too."

"How long has he been … hunting you?"

"Since he realized I wadn't dead. Not in the way he wanted, anyways," the vampire muttered, holding the fragments of the pant-leg up to the light. He poked a finger through the bullet hole and pressed the scraps back together; the gore sealed the seams, presenting an intact length of cloth. He snorted softly, satisfied, and threw it aside onto the shower-guard. "Good thing he's his own worst enemy. Regular superstitious nut-job, has all kinds'a hang-ups. All ya gotta do is know where his buttons are. He'll be pickin' up that rice fer a few hours yet."

Elbows numb from propping himself up, Conrad tried to process everything. The hunter was a vampire himself. Vampires could eat other vampires but weren't supposed to. Luce had managed to avoid being killed by an overqualified psycho for god only knew how long, and only by parlor tricks. Then, most amazing, he realized the absolute unrealism of being rescued from said hunter by Luce, who could have been _anywhere_ at three a.m.

"Oh god. Oh fuck," Conrad gasped, shivering in the chill wind of the near-miss. It was worsened by the flat tone with which Luce spoke of avoiding the demon, like he was a mall-cop instead of a killer. He stared down at the undead man at his feet as if doubting his very presence. "How did you f-find me?"

"Wacko an' me have the same hobbies, 'parently," Luce answered. "I was followin' you too."

That was the last straw. Conrad made a weak, hopeless noise and fell back on the bed. He was three steps away from hyperventilating, if just to make himself pass out and spare his cramping mind the next few minutes or hours.

"It was a clean shot, but the bullet's still in ya," Luce grunted suddenly below him, the annoyance in his voice accompanied by the tinny, terrifying scrape of metal against metal. "Thass gonna be a bitch."

Conrad looked down in time to completely flip his shit at what he saw.

Before he could scream _oh god are you even qualified_, the long knife-sharpener from his Jacob Mantolo kitchen set was already two inches deep into his destroyed leg and he snapped the wrong way, arching hard against the bed. Could feel his voice clogging in his throat again, prickles rising up his neck as he hissed silently. He was banging his fist on the bed, saved by Luce's cold, monstrously strong hand holding his leg down. Even through the deafening nerve-scream of pain, he felt the clink of metal and metal and then the sharpener was out of his leg.

He dragged in a ragged, whining breath and pushed it back out again with a violent curse as the tweezers went in right after, prodding for the blunt end of the bullet. He could feel it shifting in the tight clench of his flesh, pushing up against the oily inflamed swelling: his body's desperate attempt to make the ragged edges of the hole touch again and heal. He gagged and bit his fist, whimpering sharply and then roaring as he felt the cold nugget move too clearly to stay sane, and then articulacy devolved into pure pain and then, finally, greyness.

"Oy, faggot."

Conrad didn't know when he fell back on the bed, didn't know how long he'd been there, but the slapping at his face was light and sharp, different from deep and burning. His eyes fluttered open. Luce was above him, deep lines under his eyes and between his brows.

"Don' pass out. Hard part's done. Yer a half-ounce lighter."

Conrad mumbled weakly, but his exit into oblivion had already closed: he was in for the count. He breathed and tried to steady himself, then nearly kicked out with his good leg when another burst of pain hit him. With white hands clamped around his ankle and knee, Luce was licking his leg, brusquely working into the wound and sucking.

Conrad's stomach prickled half from the idea and half from the slippery, painful sensation and he tried to yank it away, but the attempt hurt like hell and came as little more than a nudge to the vampire. He huffed, neck red.

"Do you, uh, _mind_?"

"Yer leg's beggin' ta be a ball'a pus after takin' a bath in that puddle, and I was comin' fer a bite anyways," Luce snapped, looking twice as fierce with a ring of cold blood layered over his sneering mouth. "Least you can do is lemme take the edge off."

"Great. Go ahead. Have fun. My body is … your buffet," Conrad said hopelessly, because it was all he could say, then fell back and moaned silently again, clammy hands to his face.

But in that darkness, abiding the shifting contact at his leg, he thought. He thought about what was happening below him and what had been happening since he had woken up and probably before. Luce with tools. Luce with blood on his hands.

The business with the scissors and knife sharpener – a makeshift protrusion rod, like the type he used at the morgue to track bullet trajectories – wasn't any clumsy skill forced through Luce's porous yellow skin by sheer number of years alive. The way the vampire worked was skilled, ordered. He knew exactly what he was doing inside and out. Knew what tendons to avoid.

The way he was licking, he was _cleaning_, and Conrad remembered that whatever Luce licked healed faster. He was taking care of him, or at least his body. And it was a natural process. A practiced response.

Conrad's hands fell from his eyes.

"You used to be a doctor."

"Still a doctor," Luce Worth responded after a long minute, eyes still sharp with his work. Conrad propped himself up again and stared at him in something like awe, realizing he knew nothing about the once-man at his feet. The way Luce wasn't looking at him, intricate veiny hands wrapping the gauze up his leg with a watchmaker's precision, made him seem even more like something to watch, but never touch or know.

"How did … you become a vampire?" Conrad asked before he could stop himself. Luce's skinny fingers froze on his knee, jaw locking. Conrad swallowed, not awake enough to feel the drop of his stomach or wonder if he'd made a mistake. "I heard some things. Before I passed out."

Luce looked up at him and kept his gaze for a long time, then pulled away from his leg, fully wrapped in snowy white.

"Make do with what ya heard," he said shortly, voice rough. He got to his feet, head still bowed as he wiped at a splotch of dried blood on his skeletal chest then reached for his tools. "Ain't yer business. Yer good fer now. Go ta sleep."

"Was it bad?"

"What part'a shut up and sleep is yer ear fuckin' up? You got a bullet in that, too?" Luce snarled, threat obvious in the clench of his bloody fingers over the knife sharpener.

"I just, I can't — you want me to _sleep_?" Conrad demanded, trying to communicate where the comprehension gap lay: it wasn't the idea that his body could stop working (oh, that was very possible) but the idea of letting it happen like there was nothing wrong and remaining helpless in the dark for seven subsequent hours. "You're insane. He's still out there and – for fuck's sake, y-you ripped out my alarm system."

"Yer alarm system was shit. And yer best defense against Abner is yer front door," Luce told him as he gathered his kit and then dragged the shower-guard off the bed, crumpling it. The caving planes of his chest as he worked made him look bare and fierce and almost barbaric, as hard as his glare. The sharp yellow light of the lamp hit him like desert sun, making Conrad think of scraggly trees and red earth.

"He's a real vamp, all rules apply. Old blood. You don't invite him in, he can't get ta you. Can't get inta anyplace you think of as yours. Just keep your dumb yuppie mouth shut, try an' work durin' the day and you'll be safe here. He doesn't want you dead anyways."

With that, Luce walked the plastic tangle to the bathroom and threw it into the tub, following it with all the tools, which hit the bottom with earsplitting clangs that made Conrad almost bite his tongue in half. He stepped back, too thin to comprehend, and wiped the rest of the wet blood off on his black pants. Reaching for his coat, which was hanging limply from the counter, the vampire walked back into Conrad's bedroom proper and stopped to sling the furry red-stained thing over his bare shoulders.

"Last time I checked, he doesn't kill humans. That was 'bout a decade or so ago, though. He might'a updated ta get more with the times."

Luce turned and started for the door, a simple and final motion that made all manner of alarm-bells go off in Conrad's head.

"Where the fuck are you going?" Conrad demanded. Luce stopped, looked over his shoulder. That little turn wasn't near enough: the majority of his stick-thin body was still facing the door. Conrad's heart did not cease its sudden pounding, but actually sped up. "You are not leaving. There is no way in _hell_ you are leaving."

Luce looked genuinely perturbed. Conrad would have felt proud of eliciting such an honest emotion if he hadn't been completely out of his mind and burning with an inexplicable urgency to keep the vampire in the dark room.

"Figured I'd skip the self-righteous bullshit and get the hell out," Luce muttered. When Conrad stared at him with wild eyes, he turned around with a dry expression, brow arched. He crossed his stick-thin arms. "Dunno if you got the memo, but when shit like this happens, normal people usually take righ' abou' now ta start bitchin at the freak that got 'em dragged into all'a this. Recoilin' in uncomprehendin' fear and all that."

"You think I don't know that?" Conrad nearly shrieked, voice cracking with his own disbelief. He struggled to form coherent words around the knot of his stomach, teeth grit so hard it made his jaw ache. "I should _hate you_. I should have hated you way before this, if just because of the windows and the stalking and my _door_ and my fucking keys, don't _think_ I've forgotten about my fucking keys. But I am more afraid than I have ever been in my entire life, and I've spent – god, I've spent _years_ being pointlessly terrified of every little fucking thing so that's saying something. I am _anything_ but normal. I don't care what I'm supposed to be feeling, and I really don't give a rat's ass how much you want to vanish into the night and not deal with me."

Luce's mouth opened, lips already hiked over his fangs, but Conrad's voice burst out of his tight throat like a geyser breaking through rock, his finger pinned on the vampire's bony chest.

"You got me shot. There is a freak out there who smells like bleach and wants both of us in an unimaginable amount of pain and I don't see how throwing you out is going to make me any safer and _no_ your vampire invitation bullshit doesn't make it all better. He already knows we're together or whatever we are, so we _are_, so you _deal_ with my ass. I say you stay, _you stay_."

It all came out in a rising shout and, when he stopped, Conrad realized he was shaking. His trembling fingers knotted into the fabric of his sweater-vest, still clotted with the last of the grime from the alley. The charcoal fabric looked like rough concrete, moisture beading atop it. Conrad swallowed heavily.

"I just … can't be alone right now," he whispered to the sheets and his wrapped leg. "I think I'll go insane, if I'm alone."

He felt Luce staring intently at the bow of his neck and just waited. It wasn't long.

"An I'm starved. If I stay, I'll bite into you."

_And your level of blood-loss says that's not an option_, the doctor hiding under the stubble and scars seemed to say, red gaze unflinching. Conrad felt all the strength drain from his chest, a hopeless chill settling in like lead and weighing him towards the bed. His leg ached. His head hurt almost worse.

He couldn't even breathe right, but that swirling anaerobia gave him the fierceness to just return Luce's stare until the vampire snorted and shook his head.

"Yer fucked up, peaches," he said, voice gravelly, and turned for the door again.

Conrad jerked towards the door, mixture of anger and almost piteous disbelief spiking sharp in his throat, but a sharp and excruciatingly exhausted _just wait a fuckin' second, Jesus Christ ya whingin' ninny_ left him with an order he could follow. Bolt upright in bed, Conrad sat and waited, head ringing and empty. His entire self was poised on the motionless door, waiting for the inward swing. Like he promised.

A few minutes later, Luce slouched back into his bedroom with a dark plastic bag in his spidery hand, which he chewed into and began to drag down like it was the most disgusting fruit punch in the world. The package had a slightly yellowed label with a large B and a plus on it. A blood-bag.

"Where did you get that?" Conrad nearly whispered, then, louder, as something dawned so quickly and violently it wasn't like dawning but rather exploding (and he knew he was looking for something to get pissed off about so he didn't get really, really scared), "Where the fuck did you get that? You didn't have time to – my fridge. You've been keeping human blood _in my fridge_!"

"Don' lookit me like that, puppy," Luce snickered, and the sound was infinitely reassuring no matter how weak and hoarse it was. "Y'never use the bottom drawer."

Conrad tensed up, riling, then found his body had too many holes to hold so much outrage. The coroner swallowed and found himself empty again, light-headedness returning with a vengeance. Watching Luce sit down on the edge of the bed and choke the blood down with a truly nauseated, crunched expression, Conrad figured hazily that if he never _noticed_, he truly had no room to complain.

The fridge was too big for one person, anyhow. Always had been.

After Worth drained the bag and crumpled it like a juice-pouch (its oily swirls of leftover blood stuck to the plastic, Conrad tried not to look at the plastic sheet in the tub) and tossed it aside, he shucked his jacket and climbed into the bed with a distinctly annoyed air. If Conrad hadn't been staring with something bordering desperation, he might have missed the exhaustion radiating from Luce Worth's bony body, the faint shake of his stick-thin arms, but just the dip of the mattress was like a hand on the coroner's shoulder or lower back. There was a weight next to him, meaning he wasn't alone.

Letting out a shuddering breath, he laid down, knowing he would be protected for now, and that was all that mattered. But, cruelly, laying down with Luce and facing his silent bedroom was the first acknowledgment that life would go on … or that he was expected to continue after this.

He reached out. His hand clamped around Luce's side and at the first touch of solid, safe skin he was muttering something, something that sounded suspiciously like _Jesus Jesus Christ oh fuck_ but all he could hear and feel was the rising pitch of it and the knobby hardness of his knuckles in his bloodless shaking hands. His chest jerked as he didn't cry but just breathed like he had wanted to in the alley, sucking in lungful after lungful until the clench of shortage eased from his chest — until he was too numb with oxygen to remember what the vampire's knee felt like across his ribs, poised to snap him in half.

Luce's chest was cool against his forehead and the vampire didn't move away but let him shiver and cling to him, hand on his shoulder, until existing came naturally again. The pain and the early hour caught up to him and he breathed himself into slow, deep rhythm. Soon, Conrad was asleep. In the half-dark, Luce tensed as if to roll away from the coroner's loosening hands, then stopped and glanced at the curtains and the broken windows behind them. He looked at the wintery glow shining through, then at the warm light of the bedside lamp.

At last, he put a hand over Conrad's leg and tucked his blood-speckled face into his warm neck, counting himself into a matching oblivion with the soft jump of his patient's steadying pulse.


	26. Underground

A/N: WUGGGGHHHH.

That is all.

(Actually, I lied: this chapter is like a freaking word journey, and complex because of it. I just ask that you take your time to read it and not expect it to be quick and easy, because it actually spans a few months. Quick and easy chapters will come later. Gracias!)

_Warnings: flashback, disturbing crap, horrific violence, sadness, abuse, desperation, OCD vampires, hopefully no racial stereotypes but this is the Colonial South and I've read Huckleberry Finn, scary shit, did I mention this chapter is gory and terrifying_

* * *

Underground

* * *

Luce woke up crumpled against a hard surface, temple aching hard enough to blind. Dull pain. Bad pain. Groaning, he put a hand out and met with more hardness and impenetrable darkness.

Something had soaked, quick and cold, through his singlet. His elbows were scraped. He worked his gummed-up eyes open and closed, with no change in his surroundings, then cautiously, groggily groped around in the dark, palms skidding uncomprehendingly across what had to be stone. The only sounds that reached him were a soft, husky noise and a constant dripping. It took reaching forward and nearly bloodying his knuckles on the roughness of a wall to wake up, _look up_, and realize that the darkness around him was due to the night – and the wetness was from the water trickling blackly down the sides of a deep cavern, which he was at the bottom of.

The sky, reduced to a star-pricked scar in a casing of jagged rock, was probably no more than a few dozen meters away, but it seemed like a kilometer to Luce with his knees against the hard floor and his neck bent double.

Before he could think about what it meant or even how he came to be there – his last memory was of the little house and the orange of the lantern on the wooden walls, snuff and mild annoyance and a long woven coat – something blacked out a pocket of stars and slammed onto the stone a few feet away, leather slapping upon impact. Luce sucked in air through his teeth and threw himself away from the crouched form, which was nothing more than a threatening void to his unadjusted eyes. His stunned body didn't obey; his hand slipped and his head knocked against the wall and he cursed hoarsely, hand instantly cupping his swollen temple as the pain roared up anew, confusing his fear.

"Doctor Worth."

The voice was cold, masculine and entirely too close: the same hissing timber of the bloke in his shop, just a little stronger. The same bloke he'd shortly get to renaming as his kidnapper, if his head would cooperate and stop whining at every little twitch.

"Whatever pit'a hell this is, yer lettin' me out," Luce heard himself growl, weak and low.

Battered as he was, he was seized by a dogged urge to be on his feet to face the man. No one had ever found him on his knees before. The slap of his hand to the wet stone was audible as he dragged himself upwards, hardly feeling his swollen face contort in effort. Goddamn, but the man could throw a punch. How long had he been out?

"Whass bugged in yer head? Where'd you take me?" he croaked out, mouth dry. "How d'ya … know my bloody name?"

"Your documents provided it. I brought them along with your equipment."

A short, crisp sizzle made Luce look over his shoulder, then the flare of a lamp chased back the darkness and overwhelmed his senses. The little flame sliced to the back of his dry eyeballs, inflaming the last of the snuff buzz and making him recoil with a grunt before he could see the man behind the lamp. He cursed behind his teeth.

"If I overlooked anything, you would do well to alert me immediately. There will be little time to retrieve it."

Luce dragged in a chest-full of the cool, stale air and forced himself around, leaning heavily on the wall. He put his hand between his eyes and the lamp, only able to see enough in the hard yellow to tell that the man had put on protective lenses and was again hiding in the brim of the old woven hat. Then Luce's eyes traveled beyond the sharp yellows and blacks of his kidnapper and into the soft glow dusting the rest of the cavern.

Standing along the far wall of the miserable crack in the earth was the hand-carved desk and the medicine cabinet, every bottle perfectly lined up along its surface with obsessive care. His peeling books, all stacked with mirroring stringency in columns of equal height and positioned parallel to the desk; his tools along the far wall, arranged according to size.

The relentlessness of the geometry faded to a murmur in the back of his head when Luce realized the man had gutted his shop. Taken everything and pushed it down into a cave.

"Christ," he breathed out, trying to make the seams between the wooden furniture and the ancient black stone fit in his mind. Trying to see any scenario where a desk could survive such a drop. His skin, clammy, prickled viciously against the rock wall and his soaked undershirt. "Th' hell is this?"

"Your work place."

His hearing was finally coming back to him, sounds filtering in clearer and louder. The husky, rhythmic noise in the background rose higher and Luce shook it away, pushing himself away from the wall. The vertigo did a knock-out job of rearranging his focus.

"You nabbed me ta have me _work_ on someone?" he hissed, fighting to understand. The huffing sound swelled up in his periphery again, confusing his efforts at speaking in complete sentences. "The hell couldn't you've jus' brought 'em to me? Y'nearly broke — a'right, whass that goddamn racket?"

Squinting, the doctor turned then cursed sharply, drawing backwards again. At the opposite end of the crevice was a cage. Inside that cage was a girl.

She looked like a tiny-boned slave girl, crumpled inside a filthy mutton shift that had a tacky brown discoloration down the front, as if a great gout of blood had fallen there and then dried. She was staring at him through the bars, dark fingers clawed around them, nostrils flaring rhythmically. She was glistening, looking caught up in the final twitches of diptheria or something worse, eyes wide.

It had to have been a trick of the spiteful yellow light, but those eyes glinted blood red.

"She has a disease. The most terrible kind," the man behind him said hoarsely, each word coming out like a boot-fall in a military line-up. Perfectly measured but slightly muffled, as if from behind a mask. "You will cure her."

"She's in a bloody _cage_," Luce rasped in disbelief, turning. The lamp had found its way to his desk and now he could see the man in full. A heavy leather coat had replaced the ill-woven cloth one and his kidnapper stood tall and still, protective lenses over his eyes and a leather mask over his nose and mouth. What skin Luce could see was perversely white, hemmed in by dark hair descending from his temples.

"Her condition demands it," the Coat answered with a tilt of his head, finishing in a maddening monotone, "You will cure her."

Luce couldn't understand it. He didn't try to, when the answer was simple. Really, at the base of things, he'd had about enough of all of it.

He didn't do well with being ordered around. Yet another reason he would have been a shit nurse.

"Y'think that," Luce snorted harshly, pushing his hand through his hair. He shook his head as brusquely as he could without setting off the mines in his temple. "I quit bein' a doctor the second I'm outta my shop. Don't matter if someone busts my skull ta do it. Feel fer yer gal, but ya kin start by gettin' her outta that cage and upstate to a real doc. I'm leavin. F'you got those trappins down here, there's gotta be a walkin way out. You try an' put a boot in my path, I'll bloody you so – "

The only warning Luce got was a low, windy sound that was more pressure-change than vibration: suddenly, the man several meters to his left had him by the throat and was hard at work crushing him flat against the wall that had been ten meters to his right. The impact stole all the breath from his bony body. His bare feet were off the floor; pain daggered from the base of his skull. Bucking, Luce scrabbled at the gloved hand angled around his thin throat, tearing at the fabric of his sleeve and kicking out with his feet.

The man's arm and his grip were like stone, motionless. Lip curling from his teeth, Luce struggled jerkily until the man's other hand came down on his chest and pushed at his sternum until his entire body creaked. He stilled through the basest of his remaining instincts, belly twitching in a frenzy. He stared downwards and his attempt to swallow stuck against the man's palm, grating painfully.

"You will cure her or I will end your life," the man said without emotion. His goggles gleamed up at him in the yellow light of the lamp, myriad scratches fazing in and out of focus as Luce's own vision weaved. "She is in your care. God willing, she will not depart it."

Luce forced a little air out of his teeth, chin forced high. After a moment more of staring – grinding the message in with the dripping void behind him and the girl's harsh, rhythmic breathing – the tall man dropped him. He hit hard, nearly twisting his foot underneath himself, but by that point his captor had backed out of the light, leaving him doubled and choking for air in the orangey glow. Then he left.

No amount of weaving vision or head trauma could have excused the jump onto the wall, and the weighty, loping motions and whips of his coat that took him up the sheer rock wall and into the night sky.

* * *

Luce knew an ultimatum when he heard one, so he didn't waste time panicking.

For days, he mixed the contents of his battered jars and dug into the recesses of books he'd never touched, trying to reason through symptoms. With a focus only gifted to those with sparse but intelligent minds, he figured that Coat's mention of his fictional witch-doctoring wasn't at all coincidental. What the girl had looked normal enough, if fatal, but he wasn't going to skimp on the ritual.

There was also the fact of the man jumping up the wall like a bloody kangaroo to deal with, but that wasn't his direct concern.

Trying to read in the low light of dusk made his head ache something terrible, only worsened by the grinding want of snuff in his skinny body. He even tried to talk to the girl. Some really underestimated peoples' ability to tell you what was wrong with them, or what they thought they were feeling. She was too weak for much of anything, curled up limply on the floor of the cage, hiding in the tatters of her dress. Started crying if he pressed too much. Sneering through nothing more than frustration, he went back to his books.

The Coat told him he couldn't take her out of the cage, and he had to do his work during the day, when she would be more pliant – and it seemed to be a good bit of advice, with as quickly and finally as the gal fell asleep the second the sun came up. Anybody looking at her would have thought she was dead.

During the day, when it was just him and the girl, the cavern was twice as small and quiet as insanity. Far above him, he could hear grass of some kind rustling, but it was like he was seeing the sound as it skimmed over the top of the cavern, and he stood in the splotch of sunlight and just stared upwards for long periods. It almost spooked him, how long he stayed staring at the sky.

The Coat only came at night, and expected results during that time. For that, Luce needed more candles. It was another way of getting the freak out of the cavern in order to grope around for a possible way out.

By that point, he was just frustrated. Maybe he wasn't giving proper due to the amount of damage that the man and his stone grip could do to him, but Luce had also never been very good at being afraid, much less remaining in a constant state of fear. Irritation and efficiency always slipped in, hardening him and tightening his hands into fists. But the one time Luce reached for the new candles, the Coat actually flinched away, lenses fixed tensely on his grey-smeared palms. They stood a distance from each other, Luce locked in uncomprehending wariness, until the man backed away and placed the candles – in a row, always in a row – on the top of the desk, then retreated into a corner to watch, entire form reduced to the gleam off of his lenses.

He stayed there the entire night, only leaving when the sky began to lighten to a dove grey far, far above them.

Luce had been there two days when his first meal appeared. His captor dragged things in for him. Halves of things. The first time the monster dropped in, hunched, with the skidding corpse of a cow behind him, Luce nearly bashed his head in again trying to get a safe distance away. The corpse fell on the cave floor with a wet-meat weight. Luce was almost transfixed by the taffy-like softness of the white skin swooping between the cow's stick legs and barrel torso. Then came the creaking of leather, and Luce realized his captor had straightened and was staring at him. Expectantly.

"The 'ell am I s'posed to do wiv'at?" he slurred. The dark and his frustration were making him hazy and slow, muddying up the usually quick liquor of his blood.

"Eat."

The single syllable was as curt and uncomprehending as the Coat's stare. Like a bitter scent, Luce sensed the gap in between them in that moment, an alienation so complete it made his breath catch, and he realized he wasn't quite human to this person. Or human meant something else. Then the Coat took off up the side of the cave wall with those snapping movements that blurred at the edges, too quick to see.

Far off in the corner, the girl started moaning. The sound was high and unbearably shaky, and he realized, unless she had food back there, she hadn't taken in anything for as long as he had. After staring at the great white and black mound in disbelief, he was forced to hack into the cow's side with one of his bonesaws and dig his fingers into the tacky gore. He was so focused, so emptied of all common sense by the blood on his hands, that when he cut into the slippery fat-laced intestines and the smell crumpled his already empty stomach, he had to stagger to the back of the cave and swallow down bile.

When he came back, the silty black waste had oozed out onto some of the useable meat and he was too tired to curse himself. The smell hung around the cave for the next week.

He managed to tear off a chunk and cook it with agonizing slowness over a candle. When he got down on his knees and tried to hand the grease-wet tidbit to the girl, through the bars, her moan cinched into a shriek and she dragged herself backwards, rattling her head back and forth with enough force to make her braids slap at her cheeks. Ignoring the 'don't touch her at night' rule, Luce leaned flat against the bars, pushing his arm in up to his bony, scarred shoulder.

"Ya need it, love. C'mon."

The endearment was more a product of her shivering state than his own softness; it floated out of him hollowly and he only hoped he wasn't starting to care about her.

Slowly, hand over her mouth and nose, she shuffled towards him, eyes narrowed piteously against the light of the candle. He was only watching her with one eye, tired mind pointed in the direction opposite his outstretched arm. She needed to eat. She was his patient, at least until he found a way out. That was the end of it.

She reached out. Her hand hovered above his and the chunk of pinkish meat for a second before she grabbed him and, quick as a whip, bit him.

The pain was unexpectedly sharp, not that the entire thing didn't have his skin sizzling with adrenaline. Luce cried out gutturally and yanked his hand out of the cage, tearing himself away from her working jaw and cracking his elbow on the bars. His palm popped free from her bloody mouth and brought with it a hysterical shriek, her dark hands caught between shoving at her lips and rattling the cage.

Luce rocked backwards and clamped his hand between his knees, hissing and cursing until the pain, too sharp to be good, faded to a tolerable buzz. He staggered to his feet before it was safe, almost falling over, and looked back at her, unshaven face twisted coldly.

"Ain't the one what locked you up," he hissed, and briefly her shrieks condensed into words – something about _needing it, needing it please_ – and that was all he got out of her before she dissolved into nonsense.

He had the cow all to himself. It was up to their mutual captor to feed the crazy girl, but it was almost as exhausting working his meals free, especially now that he had a busted hand. Good thing he had never needed much food, even when he was working. Or, more accurately, scrambling for what little he remembered of abo lore and, when that failed, making shit up.

He only hoped his well of shit was endless, but he had never been very creative about things he wasn't interested in – and the girl wasn't getting any pinker.

* * *

The fourth time he came, the Coat brought something with him. Something that wasn't half-animals or unknown plants for the doctor's jars.

Luce was at his worktable, painstakingly peeling a strange root with one of his long blades and nicking his fingers every other stroke. He turned at the sound of leather slapping on stone, knowing the Coat's calling sound by then, and immediately squinted. At length, he reached up and rubbed his eyes, but it didn't clear the foggy layer from the Coat's straightening form. Frowning, Luce had a brief, criminally neutral thought about cataracts before he saw it. The thing inside the fog.

The mist was moving gently, though the air inside the cave hadn't stirred since the earthquake that formed it. As Luce watched, the white substance twisted into a slithering line of paleness. Crossing the length of the cave with a disturbing fluidity, it curled to a halt right in front of his face, soundless and hauntingly bright. Luce choked and jerked away out of instinct, staring into the sharp slits of orange in the fog. The longer it settled into the cool air in front of him, he saw more things: a serpentine neck, a rodent-like face, tiny swept-back ears and paws. An echo of child-like inquiry accompanied a tilt of its transparent head.

Behind it, the Coat snapped his fingers. The apparition lingered for no more than an instant before rearing backwards and disintegrating into sparse curls of smoke, which chased each other underneath the hem of the man's stock-still jacket. He jerked the clothing straight and Luce caught a flash of white underneath, small and textured like fur. A pelt.

"The hell?" he hissed out, not even hearing himself speak. Luce only realized he was gripping the blade so hard it was cutting into his hand when he felt the blood well beneath his fingers and let go. The blade clattered to the floor. He could only see the red because of the silver behind it, and couldn't even feel the cut.

Like clockwork, the girl set up moaning again. The Coat just looked at him, then turned and settled into the corner. Waiting.

In direct response to the silence, Luce turned, wiped the blood off his hands, picked up the knife and finished peeling, bony hands shaking slightly.

* * *

About the time the cow corpse needed getting rid of, he found a use for the chasm. It was in the back of the cave. Dropped off to god knew where. Black as sin.

The discovery coincided with another important realization: he might not be getting out of this.

Luce spent many a day – such a bloody packaged term, a _day,_ with the sun beating down on his back as the days got longer and the season started to change – staring into it, pressing his filthy bare feet onto the edge and trying to imagine the drop in his stomach as he followed all the food scraps and the shit into the earth, but he couldn't. His desperation wasn't high enough – and he didn't think it ever would be. There was something basic in him, in his wiry form and his red dirt upbringing, that rebelled at such an exit. No matter what hell was going to smear him to the stone over the next week or month or year, he wouldn't submit to gravity.

No doubt, he thought about escaping – in all forms. He wasn't one to flinch away from anything, the hell what the church said, so one day he had a scare while messing with his blades. Cut all the way up his arm and tried to _let himself go_ in the patch of sunlight, but something stopped him, and it wasn't just the nauseating quality that bleeding himself had taken on.

The sensation of slicing got tangled up with others in his confused, dry, miserable body and just made him feel sick. It had him stuffing cloth to his flayed wrists with stifled curses as the high thrilling stomach-turning sting faded and the ugly pain set in. Luce knew with a strange surety that if this had happened back at home, in some red cave with access to blades, he would have put himself out of his misery by then, or flown at the Coat and taken care of it that way.

Thirty-something was a fine age and he didn't care so much. But there was something keeping him alive, weak but insistent and maddening because of it – because everything in Luce's mind was loud and sharp and non-negotiable. He'd made it to his new world but had been shoved out of a new life before he could even get a foothold. He couldn't give it up so easily, not that anything about this was easy.

Still, he mixed and crushed and combined, trying stupid things now. Nothing brought her temperature up, and he was at a loss because he'd never tried to bring anyone's temperature _up. _She couldn't swallow half of them, so he turned to poultices, leaving them on the floor of the cage or smearing pastes onto her clammy skin while she death-slept. Nothing worked.

When the Coat realized his results weren't going to be instant and he could stop crouching like a gargoyle in the corner, he took to being gone most of the time, which would have made Luce almost grateful if _most of the time_ hadn't meant he forgot to come back and feed him. Him and the girl both.

Girl was pale and getting paler. He started to second-guess himself when he'd said she was negroid: she had the full lips and high cheekbones, but that first day was seeming more and more like a hallucination (and Luce had had his fair share of those to recognize the milky disconnection) because she just kept getting paler.

The day after he tried to feed her, he hissed to the Coat that she needed to eat and it wasn't his responsibility: if he wanted her alive to cure, he'd have to take care of business. After staring at the dirty, blood-soaked cloth that he'd wrapped around his fist to cover her damn bite-marks, the Coat left. Now, every few days his captor would come back with an earthen jug, impeccably clean on the outside. Luce had stared suspiciously, but the contents were soon revealed when the girl first opened it and her voice blasted the inside of the cavern, shrill and cracking. She screamed _no no no no no_, body caving with the force of her desperation, and dashed it against the floor.

A dark liquid arced out and splattered the walls. Luce didn't need to look up to know that their captor was already up and out, and his eyes were fixed on the pool of glossy fluid spreading slowly over the floor. Blood.

It was only a few minutes of whimpering and rocking to herself in the corner before she let out a ragged sob and scraped forward on her knees, reaching for the vase and upending it into her gaping mouth with a muffled, slick gulp. He could hear it gluk-gluk-glukking into her throat and fought his own nausea. When it was empty, she licked around the neck with an animal twist of her tongue, wincing away from the congealing liquid even as she swallowed it down, a horrifying ring of cold blood around her mouth. Then she gasped and her sobs redoubled, crying for Benny again.

Benny, as far as Luce could be bothered to care, was her beau before the Coat had killed him.

The man fed her blood. Blood from the cows and livestock he dragged back for his doctor. When Luce asked, he said she needed the humors. Needed a liquid diet. To stay pure. It wasn't the first time Luce had heard of anyone subsisting off of blood – the stuff was damn nutritious, he'd heard of some tribes doing it every so often – so he let it rest if just because of the way the Coat stared at him. As if he wasn't supposed to be asking questions about the condition he was supposed to be curing.

But she'd never moved from the cage, never once had to relieve herself. Her teeth, as his palm could contest, were sharp as knives. Her eyes, large and doey when not narrowed in pain or heightened light sensitivity, were the purest kind of holly-red he'd ever seen. In any light. Night after night.

"This disease turns yer eyes red."

"She bleeds in her eyes," came the raspy answer from behind him, always in that tick-tock monotone.

"She's bloody cold as ice," Luce growled, chest tight with all of his words and suspicions. He jabbed at the crackling bowl of herbs on his knee. "An her choppers are a sight."

"She will die, if you do not hurry."

He'd been in the cave a little over a month, if he kept his days straight. All that time started to scrape at you, make you toothy. Luce had almost convinced himself that what he saw the night of his kidnapping wasn't real, but with the lengths the Coat was taking to conceal his face, it all made sense.

"You've got it, too," Luce grit out, fire in his voice. He glared up at his motionless captor, hand clamped around his pestle as though it were a club. "Doncha, ya bloody bastard. You've got whatever this poor bid's got, an yer makin me put fire to 'er so you kin snatch up the cure after."

"If her body cannot withstand the cure, her soul will remain. It is better she go to the flames without claiming a victim," the man said with a distance that left the doctor staring, and went into the sky again.

Days passed. Then weeks.

Haunted by the girl's perfect stagnation, Luce began to reach further into magicks and rituals. His life became a series of routines, all edging away from the chasm of hopelessness that lay in his mind, its physical counterpart sitting black and heavy in the back of the cave. A new dead animal arrived and the smoke from cooking the meat clotted at the top of the cavern and hung there for days, and no matter how he coughed, the spicy, filthy tang just made him ache more for fags or maybe just the suffocation that the hanging rock and darkness promised.

Started talking to himself, if just to drown out the sound of her talking to herself.

One day, something clattered at the top, in the outside world. He nearly split his knee he got to his feet so fast, and he screamed himself hoarse trying to hail it down. It was a dog.

During the day and those dusty grey hours at either end, Luce crammed himself into corners and bit at his nails, twisting away at his hard fingernails just to give his teeth something to dig into. But as the weeks wore on, his nails grew waxier and one day a jerk of his finger exposed an oily red welt and a splitting, insanely concise pain-pleasure, except that his nerves were strung as tight as barbed wire and it just made him sick to feel so much. Half of his nail was spit to the floor, and he started wrapping his fingers after that. He didn't like the looks the Coat gave him and his bleeding bits.

The man was getting worse, whatever that meant.

He seemed even cagier than either of his captives, as if the very cavern was smothering him; more and more layers were added to his face, leaving him barely human-looking, a lurching mannequin of ratted fabrics and leather straps. Sometimes, the Coat took leave when the experiments dragged on. Othertimes, Luce felt like something else was chasing him off.

The doctor felt his hidden eyes burning into his back when he pulled out bottles at random and spread them over his desk, searching for an ingredient that he would have to scrape out of an empty bottle. More and more, Luce woke from watery sleep and looked over and his entire work-station was once more parallel and balanced and perfectly, _ruthlessly_ arranged. He hallucinated a manic intensity, silent and dangerous, in the gleaming rows of tools and bottles. A terrible symmetry that made him afraid to touch and break the vibrating net around the pristine arrangement, which was sewed straight into the Coat's mind.

At its worst, secret levels of order rolled out before him, infinite and terrifying: the bottles were placed on age-lines of the wood, as were the identical blades that were arranged by width of the cutting edge. He felt like his bare feet were being sliced apart by unseen grids that coated every surface of everything. Luce reached for what he needed and _felt_ the Coat look over. The closer his hand got the tool, he could imagine the man twitching, grating, something crawling higher under his skin.

Underneath his gritty wariness, he was swamped with the feeling that he was destroying something much more than a stepladder of tools, but a universe or a law or a credo or something unifying but incomprehensible and compelling.

The Coat never came any closer to him than twenty paces, and that was pushing it, considering the length of the cave. After a few weeks Luce started to smell himself, and that was bloody saying something. It also seemed to keep the monster away from him, which was an advantage if he wanted to stay alive. The twitches from weak to strong unnerved Luce more than anything, even more than the quick way the Coat's head cracked over if he made a noise, or touched anything.

As hollowed as his mind was from concocting ritual after ritual from the bare bones he had, surviving in a dark hole, Luce had the feeling if he got his mitts on the white skin under the jacket, then his situation would change. He knew enough about totems to recognize one and that little white scrap held an animal familiar or something that was bound to the Coat. He obsessed over getting it. He spent all of his time planning ways to trick him closer, but when the Coat actually dropped down into the cavern, just the way he moved (a spidery mix between limping and lion stride, unstable and soundless) was enough to tell him he didn't want to be in close contact with him. Something in his very spine rebelled, kept him against the back of the wall or near the girl.

It wasn't cowardice, but he almost didn't have a reason to be brave. Pushed down to the bottom of his brainstem, he lurked there, low and flat and silent. Waiting for something to end so he wouldn't have to.

* * *

More time passed. She spoke sometimes. Not to him, but she spoke.

Luce could hardly understand her through her accent, which was rich and drawling unless it was drawn tight into a shriek. The girl would ramble on and on, rocking to herself and clawing at her hair and skin, whimpering about Benny and how he promised to Make her and take her someplace but Benny was dead. The sorrow and hysteria in her was real, but over the weeks and weeks, Luce had become so packed around himself by his desperation (lashed tight around his spine, no more caring flesh to spare and he was already a lean bloke) that eventually it just hurt his head something terrible as the snuff withdrawal crashed up against her shrill, pointless screams. Finally, he screamed at her to shut up, heart beating painfully fast, all the walls closing in as he realized he wasn't getting out and he didn't have the care to kill himself.

And she shut up. But she watched him – no. Hunched low in her cage, studs of her white teeth pressing into her bottom lip, she watched his heart.

The red of her eyes were like the tip of an arrow and it was trained on his thumping center. She went too quiet, too still, hunger trembling on her lips, and he had to duck around the corner and bash his fists against the walls until they bled, just to put force to something after so long staying perfectly still and measuring his every step under Coat's eyes, paralyzed with a fear as foreign as it was smothering. It turned his fists messy oily orange, and she started screaming again, her shrieks that of a starving beast.

It was then that he realized what he had been avoiding and packaging into symptoms. She was a demon. Both of them were, and what they survived off of was no secret.

That was the closest Luce Worth came to throwing himself into the chasm, but he stopped a meter short and clattered to the ground, sobbing. They were dry, wracking things that made the husk of his chest creak, unknown to him before that moment. He heard a hoarse scream peel away from hers and realized it was barreling out of his own sandpaper throat. It split his crackling lips and his crackling mind and the only wetness he knew came dribbling out.

Being deprived of a solid gulp of water was more maddening than Luce had ever imagined, but only because of the desperate sense of thirst that already hung in the air.

* * *

Luce had lost track of the weeks when the Coat came down with torn clothing and the unsteadiest of trembles in his hands and shoulders. He held a glass jar, filled to the brim with red liquid. He set it on the desk, in the display of lines and angles Luce hadn't touched for days.

It looked like blood, but he didn't give it to the girl. It stayed there in the lantern light, unspeakably thick and bright.

"S'that?"

Luce could hardly recognize the sound of his own voice. Hadn't needed to talk. Coat wasn't interested in excuses.

And whenever he talked, he came back to himself a little. Wasn't so keen on that.

"Lycan blood."

The Coat's voice was horribly steady for how he was shaking. The term passed through Luce's aching head, finding no niche. Lycan must have been some kind of animal he hadn't had at home. Luce sat up, torn with anticipation for a new material and the wrenching certainty it wouldn't work.

His mind was starting to spiral. It had taken a while to do so, but he was going down hard and he felt the loss of every brittle inch of himself. Above him, the Coat hunched over the doctor's work table and ran his gloved hands in the tense air above his configurations, his lines and his testament.

"There are balances, even in the darkest of regions. Lycans are dark nature, nightwalkers are dark stagnation. Combined, they could cancel. Get this into her."

"The hell am I s'posed to do that? Make 'er drink it?" Luce croaked.

"No. Not directly. Withdraw her blood. Mix it with the sample," the Coat bit out, turning around and cocking his head, a once-expensive syringe in his gloved hand. The needle was now clotted with an orangey dust. "Dilute. Inject."

"Ain't usin that. Ain't big on cleanliness, but I wouldn't use that thing on my wors' enemy. S'gonna kill 'er."

"She will weather it," he replied, putting the needle down.

"You mean the thing inside'a her will!" Luce snapped, reaching out.

He was peripherally shocked by the thinness of his arms as he heaved himself to his feet for the first time in days, chest working hard like holey bellows. The vertigo sent his head spinning and he felt, all over, how goddamn weak he was. Blood weak, bone weak, the kind that made him not care about the tension in the Coat's shoulders and the cold way he was staring.

"The hell's so special about her? Why're you doin this? Why're you fightin' ta get this thing outta her when yer puttin' her through hell ta do it and you'd just as soon she die?"

"She is virginal," the Coat rasped, nearly roared, tall frame vibrating. "The demon in her has not fed on human life. The pact has not been sealed. If there is any possibility that this will succeed, it lies in her. Now, create the first dilution."

Before, it had been poultices. Herbs that could do no more than send the human digestive tract running hot and fast. Ashes and feathers and mutters.

When he injected the first mixture into her, jabbing the rust-coated needle into the soft of her brown-grey arm while their captor held her twisting body still, Luce thought she was going to die.

When he pushed her cage into the sunlight at the Coat's orders, he thought she was going to die, the way she screamed and clawed and _steamed_, red eyes rolling back in her head. Terrified at the explosion of noise and pain, he threw himself against the cage and forced it back into the shadow, heart slamming in his chest. She returned to the corner of it shivering wildly, covered in stone-like burns. Incantations made her hiss, all while the Coat watched impassively, gloved hands knotted at his sides.

Coated in bitter sweat and oily desperation, Luce diluted the Lycan blood further and further, halving it again and again in the thin beams of daylight that pierced the cave, unknowing of why the liquid burned so painfully in her. Sixteen-fold, thirtytwo-fold, sixtyfour-fold. For hours, the combination was warm, eerie and bright. Every time they forced it into her, he thought she was going to die and his heart tightened instinctively because of it, because of his hands on the needle – and she never did.

She never changed back human, either, and with every near-act of murder, Luce's mind hardened beyond comprehension. He emptied, started seeing her as an animal. It worked, for what he had to do.

It had been a long time.

* * *

More weeks passed.

He was against the wall. He was trying to sleep (trying to see the point in sleeping, with as thin and dingy as his unconsciousness was and only to come back to _this_) when he heard her. Low and husky.

"Suh. Suh."

"You talkin' ta me now?" he rasped at the wall after an eon, nothing but a whisper himself. Nothing but a cough of a man. His eyes were hovering at the line of his lids, rolled back just slightly, like he was flirting with the cusp of something else.

He'd never needed to talk to anyone. Fine being alone. And talking to her made her real again. Took him away from the red, dry dirt landscape of his thoughts.

"I's talkin', I's talkin'," she whispered, and the way she pushed the words out sharp and smart, almost foreign in their succinctness, made him look over.

Her face, all roundness and plush lips, was once again just behind the bars, but she was motioning him over with a hand, berry-red eyes wide. Cracked through with a mixture of exhaustion and curdling suspicion, Luce snorted and turned back around, cradling his knees in his hands. He was all tendon now.

He could hear himself creaking, even the parts that weren't supposed to.

She hailed him again with the same insistent _suh suh,_ whining and soft in turns until, surrendering, he crawled over to her, unable to part from the stone and walk. She talked him closer like a lost mutt, words so fast his ears couldn't keep up even as he knew they weren't fast. Everything just dissolved as soon as it reached the sphere of his head.

"We d'same, dat devil'n me. I's strong like him," she whispered when he was within arms reach. He stayed there, stared there, feeling the slackness of his skin beneath his dry eyes as he looked into hers. "You ne'r gonna cure me 'cos what I got ain' for curin."

"I tried everythin' I know," Luce heard himself say, some of the weakness bleeding into his voice. She didn't flinch away, just kept holding his eyes, so he sucked in a breath and said more, letting it fall to the hard floor. "Tried bloody everythin' I kin think an' more."

"You don' need ta be doin that, don' needa be heah. You done nothin' wrong."

He couldn't ever remember so many words coming out of her, but in that moment, it all seemed natural. Something that had waited a long time to happen. He muttered it back, _he hadn't done anything wrong – _ it was damn right – and she nodded. Her eyes were bright, pulling him in.

"I done nothin' wrong too. Dis all bad, all wrong. He the devil, I seen his insides and they black. He kilt my Benny and stole me. But me, I kin git us out, inna the grass. Inna the forest agin."

Forests. The memory of forests was like a painful hallucination, green turned acidic and overwhelming in his memory. Crisp, sweet. Space to move. He hadn't run in months and the cramp was a constant ache in his knees, corkscrewing all the way up into his chest.

Luce almost sobbed at the thought but her red eyes pushed his mind front and center, away from any fraying madnesses. Looking at her, Luce felt safe. Calm for the first time since he woke up. Calm like snuff. The back of his mind extended into soothing blackness, his starved muscles relaxing, and he just looked.

She was goddamn beautiful.

"Iss all gonna be righ'. You jus le'me out, and I's gon' git us outta heah. I fo'give you ever-thin you ever done t'me, you jus hatta le'me out."

Her voice was so smooth.

"Le'me out, suh. You gots ta."

"M'sorry. Sorry fer it all. What I've done to ya."

Someone was crying.

"He'd kill me, f'I didn'."

"Ah knows it. But you gon' fix everythin."

As if the air were syrup, Luce reached up. He could feel his every joint in his hand, which made him realize he was nothing but bones. Bones and razor-scars. A prickle built behind his ears. This was what he had to do, if he ever wanted to be more than hard things lashed together with tendon. If he had just done it earlier, trusted her, it would have saved them both so much pain.

He wrapped his hand around the silver latch and began to pull down – began to feel the creak and the give, her way to freedom – when something dug down into his shoulder and ripped him away from the cloud of quiet, flinging him backwards. His head cracked against the floor and everything went black for a moment.

When everything came back, he was on his back and the cavern shook with her screeches and a sizzling sound; between them, their captor was standing with a jar of water and a small wooden cross, stock-still.

All the things Luce _hadn't felt_ for a precious few seconds came bubbling back under his skin, nearly crushing him and his ability to breathe. Unable to control himself, he moaned, smothering the sound in his gut by curling into a shaking ball, hands clawed against the stone. His face was dry, but that didn't mean anything.

The Coat paced away from her writhing form, then looked down at his other captive, face cocooned in fresh white strips.

"Never look her in the eye. Her kind have a witching power." The man's emotionless staccato voice brought back the deepest of desperations in Luce's gut. "They will seduce your mind."

Without even looking at her, Luce felt her hunger scraping along side the underside of his stomach like a devil vibration, and realized that was it.

Once, they might have escaped. That time was past. Even if he let her out now, she would tear him apart for his blood.

* * *

Luce had just finished mixing up the last dilutions of the animal blood and the demon girl's blood when his last moment came, unexpected in its minimalism.

It was a simple combination of the dogged nervousness of being watched – even as it drove repulsed shivers under his skin, forcing his head a few degrees to the side, the Coat had obviously decided he couldn't be trusted by himself – and a slip of a blade. His skin was too thin, rotted down to a scummy yellow layer by a patchy diet of meat and little else. His mind was in worse shape, porous and weak. Before Luce knew it, his muddy, too-thick blood was on the floor and he reached for the instrument.

Too close.

He saw the gleam of the cage a second before her dark-dusky hand snapped out and yanked him against the cage with a monstrous quickness and strength, dislocating his shoulder. The only thing he could think in the split second before it happened – as it happened – was that she had never reached beyond the cage before and he didn't understand it. And he didn't particularly care.

The muffled, instant pop at his collarbone was almost enough to drown out the searing pain as she tore into his wrist with dagger canines and the full strength of her jaw. Before Luce could even cry out, he was ripped away and kicked back, the whistle of air strong in his ears.

He rolled to a stop, arching against the stone as two different kinds of pain wrecked his body. Then, panting and forcing a brittle elbow beneath him, Luce looked behind him and his eyes widened. The Coat was in front of the girl's cage, gloved hands braced atop it, but the girl was scarcely a girl anymore. As Luce watched, her dark face elongated ad paled, pulled at the chin and the cheekbones until her nose began to warp into ghastly slits, rows of needle teeth pushing out from her whitening gums. Her red irises had shrunk down to nothing and her fingers were long, so long, and scratching for him.

The Coat just stood and watched her writhe in the pulsing yellow light of the lamp. He watched her scratch and shriek as the last of the humanity bled from her in a noxious shimmering smoke, and then spoke.

"It has her."

Each word like a drop on a stone floor. His head jerked to the side, creating an audible crack.

"It has her."

A husky sound rose from so long ago, from when Luce first woke up. Seemed like a lifetime ago. But this time, it was coming from the Coat. Slowly, his body began to heave, breaths getting deeper and hoarser until he suddenly stepped forward and snapped the latch off the cage with a jerk of his hand, flinging the door open.

Throat closing, Luce saw the she-monster rise up with inhuman quickness, or saw her sitting and then saw her mid-leap, maw gaping – and then, just as quickly, saw her caught in the Coat's thick arms.

There was no struggle. He slammed her to his chest and snapped her neck with a jerk of his arm. The cracking vegetable sound made Luce's stomach cave flat to his spine, and he was stumbling to his feet before he could even think, pain a distant buzz in his limbs. Fear narrowed his vision to silhouettes: below the hem of the man's coat, the girl's tiny naked feet pointed with excruciating sharpness then went slack. Then the Coat doubled with a stifled growl, and there was a slow, sticky ripping sound, twice as grisly.

Cool blood splattered down onto his boots and something hit the floor with eerie softness, cushioned by a pile of thick brown braids.

Frozen, the Coat gripped onto her body, shivers crawling up his tall frame. Luce only stopped backing up when he felt the wall of the cave scrape his back, and then the man flung the girl's body onto his work-table, sending his tools scattering. With a hoarse roar, he seized the cage and crushed one side of it, crumpling the bars like clay, then dashed it against the wall and did the same with the lamp. Oil splattered and caught fire.

The clanging sound and the sudden burst of heat broke Luce's trance and he staggered to the side, slipping on the spreading pile of blood. Teeth clacking shut on his tongue, he fell back on his desk and tumbled into his piles of books, cursing as their sharp edges tore into his back.

The Coat turned whip-crack quick at the noise, the tremulous shifting of the freed flames reflected in his lenses, and Luce saw the sparking, quivering, uncontrollable madness brimming in him. He felt the monster's eyes systematically tear apart the books scattered beneath him, crushed from their pristine towers. The books were his pieces, the last barrier of his controlled reality – and blood was everywhere, a rich stink in the close, dirty air.

The chaotic bristling angles of the peeling books ripped through his organs, letting free hot madness into the blackness of his insides, raw and unshaped like the inside of the cave.

The Coat erupted with a ghastly noise, an animal howl, and ripped off the cloth over his face with muted jerks of his bunched-up back, flinging it away and following with the leather mask. Cradling his dislocated arm, Luce shouted as his starved body was wrenched from the pile of books, the Coat's gloved hands tight enough to break bone. The last thing he saw was the pure white of fangs splitting the darkness of the monster's open, roaring throat before pain lanced through his chest, curling in his weak heart and bursting it.

Fangs split the flesh of his throat, slicing in and then ripping outwards, stealing the noise from his body. The pain was too much to comprehend as a pressure pulled him out, out, out, emptying him.

Warm wetness flowed over Luce's shoulder, which was slowly drifting downwards, followed by his head. Gravity had finally claimed him, pulling him down into the waiting blackness. Always had been waiting.

He could feel the last of himself pulsing into the serrated maw and faded from his torn body entirely when he was flung away, head cracking on hard wood. Heard glass shatter. Another roar shook the stone, but he was too far away to feel it, or the frenzied slams of boots scaling a cavern wall.

Eyes half-lidded but unseeing, Luce died there on the ground, warm liquid pap-pap-papping onto his cooling forehead and sliding slowly down the bridge of his nose, towards the black cavern of his mouth.


	27. Scotch and Solitude

A/N: And heeeeere's where the horror element comes in. HAH. First time writing this character, don't kill me. Think I got it down okay, though, aside from the CREEPFEST THAT WILL NEVER BE OKAY.

Date: Thursday, the day before the Moonlighter's concert. Yes, it is coming.

_Warnings: language, more Veser fail/sadness, cast expansion ftw, disturbing imagery, major plot thickening like we're talking PLOT CORN SYRUP._

Also, this will bear an implied resemblance to a popular pairing in Hannadom, but to be honest, I do not support it and it will not be featured in this fic. Before anybody, you know, gets excited. Or sad. Or angry?

NO EMOTIONS ALLOWED HERE, GO HOME.

* * *

Scotch and Solitude

* * *

"Where the hell are you, Ves? I thought we were gonna catch a movie. I've been hanging in my car for, like, an hour."

"I'm kinda busy, dude. Out."

Leaning backwards onto the bar, Veser scrubbed the last of the salt off of the rim of his beer and wiped it on his tongue, absently swallowing the zing of it. At last, he caught the eye of the tall blond girl chilling in the middle booth (he'd waited at least ten minutes to toss the net down, preserving the cocky tilt of his hip against the bar just for her) and pivoted lazily on his heel, yelling over the blare of the bar music and the football game knocking around on the big screen.

"Don't worry about it. That movie sounded lame anyways."

The girl's thin eyebrows raised and he winked at her, almost grinning but remembering to keep his bottom lip up in the way that hid the saw-edge of his teeth.

"You were the one who wanted to go! What's that noise in the background?" Isaac demanded. The crackle of the bad connection cut through his deep voice like barbed wire, but his tense tone was impossible to miss. "Are you in a bar? Look, man, this isn't cool. I'm busy with school, which by the way is still happening tomorrow and every day after, and you can't keep disappearing and showing back up again like a freakin' alley cat. My mom's getting pissed. She's about to call your dad about you."

Whatever arrogant, vague response Veser had saved up abruptly evaporated. The resultant dryness made his throat cinch shut. Lee at home. Lee bent over his computer, rubbing endlessly at the sealing ring: waiting, or not waiting at all. Veser made a dull noise, dropping his head.

He knew he could have stayed a week at Isaac's house, easy, without screwing anything up. But even offered a comparative haven, he couldn't stay still. He couldn't stay anywhere for more than a few hours, and every time his phone rang, his heart bashed itself into his sternum.

He nearly wrung himself dry, revving up so hard every time for the boiling incredulity in the pit of his stomach, ready to pick up the phone and hear that miserable silence and make another stand — but every time, his gut tensed and dropped lower than before to see a friend's number. A wrong number, a text from the cell-phone company.

Five days and there was no word from Lee, and a prickly, hateful part of Veser said he liked that just fine. Convinced himself that no word from him was hurting his foster dad far worse, _serves him right_ and _what the hell Lee_ warring in his injured mind until he forced some kind of distraction on himself. Something that left him feeling not ruined.

Not really, really fucking abandoned.

"Did you hear me?"

Isaac's voice jabbed at his ear again, right about the time Veser realized the hot chick was glancing his way again, eyes half-lidded in the smoke ring of her make-up, fingers playing with a long gold necklace. The half-selkie sucked in so much breath it hurt, kicking The Switch back on again with a mindlessness that was almost freeing.

"Yeah, sucks, right?" he drawled, shoulders so loose it was like they were going to drip down his sides and stick on his hips. He plucked at the string to his hoodie, face sly. "But what can you do?"

"What? Are you even listening to me?" There was a rattle and a crackle from Isaac's end, incredibly frustrated. "You know what? Whatever. If you're gonna be a dick, you can find another crash place. Fuck you, man."

His phone beeped loud enough for the whole bar to hear and Veser's teeth snapped shut and he jammed the tiny thing to his ear, forcing out a harsh laugh from the rock-bottom of his rib-cage and turning to the side.

"No, I know. No regrets, though, right? I could've taken twenty more on a good day," he crowed into the dead phone (because any dude worth his salt did not get his ass hung up on, especially not by a pissy guy friend) and flashed a strained grin at the girl.

Her round face went blank and Veser cursed, realizing he'd flashed his freak teeth. Heart jamming itself absurdly high in his throat, he fumbled to say something else into the dead line and fix his mouth at the same time. He ended up stuttering about a kegger with some kind of retarded muppet expression; she sat back and rolled her eyes, which cruelly gave him a perfect angle of her perfect rack.

His grin ossified, ugly and hard as barnacles on his face as she drained the rest of her beer and looped her purse over her shoulder with a flick of her arm and strode out the door.

Once the door shut, the half-selkie swallowed a curse and glanced around to make sure no one had seen. Somehow, the fact that every single person's face was turned away from him made it even worse than before; he slouched against the side of the bar, kicking his heel into it. Eyes locked on the floor, single cheap beer swilling sullenly in his gut and drying on his tongue, Veser messed with his bottom lip, sucking at the faint tang of blood and the countless pockmarks of scar-tissue from when he was little. Rubbed his fingers over the butterfly bandage, which had just begun to peel off his forehead from the showers he'd snuck in at Isaac's place.

Abruptly, alone in a bar all the way down to his calling list, he felt like shit — or maybe he'd felt like shit all along, but it had been a murky, clammy pool sitting at waist-level, and it only then surged up around his naked neck. Spending the last five days ducking in and out of his friend's house and avoiding his own, skipping every single class in between, was unexpectedly exhausting. It had wedged under his fingernails and rotted away whatever politeness he claimed, turning him into some kind of mangy wolverine who snuffled around in the dark and growled at any movement. A non-person.

Veser sucked in a deep breath of cigarette smoke and heater-dried air, practically paralyzed by how much he didn't want to go outside into the miserable drizzle and find another hiding place.

After holding it, he let it out and ran a hand through the upward silver tuft of his hair, face crunching like an old can. That wasn't cool. None of this was even remotely cool, but he should have been more straight with Isaac. The guy was his friend. Or he hoped he still was, after the way he'd been tossing him around.

Like he had done so often in between being enraged and defensive, Veser went on a quick 'make everything right' kick, digging into the sandy pit of his pride to preserve whatever relationships he had left. He planned phonecalls, a few drop-bys. He was even considering an apology to Isaac's (terrifying) mother when a soft, urbane voice came from his right, barely audible over the scrape of a bar stool.

"Are you all right?"

Veser looked over, face already locked into a nasty, skeptical expression that only worsened when he saw the guy who had spoken.

It was like a breathing anachronism had sauntered into the bar, an impression exaggerated by the east-coast dinginess of their surroundings. The man was older and skinny as a rail, with a pale face that once had moderately strong features but some other force – time, his own anxiety — had worn them down to worryingly delicate proportions and dug landlines in between his brows. Silvery half-moon glasses were perched on his criminally narrow nose, odd patches of white tucked into the tufty portions of his combed-back black hair.

He was dressed ridiculously well for a glass of scotch at a shit bar, rocking a dress-shirt and a silky grey vest and slender slacks, which only made Veser more reluctant to answer him. Some kind of weirdo. He was too close to ignore, but looked like the mousey type of guy who came to bars to share sob stories but would fuck off at a harsh answer.

"Never been better," Veser muttered into his cup, looking determinedly at the senseless jumble of a football replay as he drained the very last lukewarm drops of his beer. He smacked his lips as if to say _done_ but then his eyes caught on the glowing cobalt blue of the evening outside the glass door and he couldn't quite move his feet.

To his left, the geezer was petting his scotch glass. There was a pleasant mildness in the way the old guy was looking at him that was almost cajoling. Made a shiver or two ambush the teen, even under his hoodie.

"Family troubles?" he queried after a moment, voice so watery and hesitant it immediately annoyed the half-selkie, screw what he was saying. Nosy old bastard. Veser snorted.

"No."

"Ah. My mistake."

The loser backed off, cowed, and returned to a skeletal hunch over his drink. Veser raised his brow a little to see the old man gulp nervously, pick his glass up with the very tips of his white fingers, tip it back and swallow torpidly as if the fiery liquor were water. Then he set it down and gently nudged it towards the back of the bar, where the bartender filled it up to the very top. Obviously they knew the geezer here.

Then he did it again and downed half of it in one breath, eyes closed.

"Man, you just wanna take the bottle and save the guy the arm-work?"

Veser didn't want to talk, but the jab came out of him anyways, low and aggravated. The old man looked at him as if shocked he was still there, embarrassment widening his dark, colorless eyes and making his jagged brows drift even further up and cinch above the bridge of his nose like his fancy glasses. _Prude_, the teen accused him mentally. He was of the opinion that alcoholics would be a lot more respectable if they just owned up to their problems and quit brown-bagging them.

"Oh, I actually… have a bit of an immunity to scotch," the old man stuttered thickly. He glanced down into the last layer of gold in his glass with a lost expression before tilting it towards the half-selkie with a miserable quirk of his mouth. "I – would you care for some? Drinking alone is … unhealthy, or so I hear."

Veser's brow jumped up and, almost immediately, the weak old man looked away, lips pressed together fretfully. Definitely a desperately lonely loser.

Veser had learned generally never to accept drinks from strangers, if just because of a few 'allergies' he'd gained from his selkie blood … but scotch was good, expensive, effective, and if he saw the guy pour it, where was the problem? He was also having trouble giving a fuck about anything he'd learned about keeping himself safe, particularly if Lee was the one who taught it to him. Wherever he was going, too, he was walking.

Veser scrutinized the rich-looking liquid for a minute before giving a stunted nod, putting out his hand in the most disinterested way possible. Taken aback, the old man gave a borderline tremulous smile and stuttered awkwardly for another glass, skinny torso suddenly twisted like a spring in an over-wound watch. When he passed Veser the glass, a breathless expression on his face, his spidery white hands darted back to the safety of his own glass before the teen could even brush fingers with him. Probably just thrilled to get someone to sit still long enough to talk at them, the teen thought disparagingly, being a dick just so he wouldn't pity the guy.

The glass was satisfyingly heavy in his hand and he returned the bartender's unamused look with a bare smirk. _Who needs a fake ID when you have creepy old guys who know their liquor?_ Veser determinedly looked at his reflection then tipped the glass back, entire mouth tightening around the rankness of the liquor. He coughed and hid it decently, washing the first mouthful down with another.

A strong burn started crawling up the sides of his stomach almost immediately and it didn't really make him feel any better, but it was different, which was good. A distraction.

"You know, you look extraordinarily familiar. I don't mean to pry into things that aren't my business…"

The smile on the old man's face would have been convincing, if his eyes hadn't had a steady, dark glint behind the half-moon of his glasses. It was as if the burn in Veser's own stomach had bled into the older man, giving him focus and a little weight.

"But you wouldn't bear any relation to the unfortunate woman who passed on the docks, would you?"

"Yeah," Veser said before he could stop himself. There went his instincts again, a dried husk that crackled miserably under his blood-stained tennis shoes. There was something freeing about looking the old guy in the eye and saying it in the dullest of tones. A _fuck you_ to Lee that he hoped carried all the way across the city on the cold air. "That was my mom."

"Oh, I apologize. I do apologize. I had no intention of…"

Veser shut out his blustering and they sipped in silence for a second, the teen already turning over options of who he could go to next. Who would take the longest to piss off, because really it was a waiting game and that was starting to drag at his soul and make him want to sleep. Not anywhere, but in his own bed, which was a problem.

The old man's long fingers drummed on the bar, and he drew in a powdery breath.

"It's simply, your eyes. They are quite peculiar. I've rarely seen their like."

Veser's nose wrinkled sharply, and not just because of the strange, rotting-leaf smell that drifted his way. The velvety tone he'd been tying to place abruptly popped into its proper hole and the half-selkie looked away, back instantly stiffening, hand diving for the very bottom of his pockets, very spine curving away from the older man.

_The hell, dude, is this geezer hitting on me? Sick._

All of his foppish accessories suddenly seemed weird and fetishy, especially the way he had snatched his hand away before he could touch him. Ridiculously sketchy. A scrap of his pride and self-preservation came back and Veser took a counter-intuitive gulp of the scotch, eyeing the door in the mirror. Now to get out before the creep popped the question.

"You look how I imagined … well. You will forgive me, but I have had a spirited affair with cultural lore for several decades and I have a difficult time quashing my own enthusiasm."

The old man laughed, a rushed and hoarse staccato. He paused to clear his throat and push his glasses back up his nose, other arm wrapped almost protectively across the front of his pressed vest. The buzz was getting strong enough that Veser did little more than give him a skeptical look, waiting for the man's next screw-up and a possible exit.

"Your hair and your eyes, both bear a resemblance to how I've heard selkies described. Seal people of the northern seas. Have you ever heard of them?"

Veser could say one thing about the scotch: it was so heavy, it kept his eyes from springing open.

"Nope. Stopped believing in magic when I was five," he said flatly, averting his eyes and taking another drink. "Fat guys coming down chimneys always seemed pretty suspicious to me."

"Ah, it must be my wishful mind talking," the old man murmured into his sleeve, absently teasing a lacy gay handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing his face with it, abruptly paler than before. He pressed it to his mouth, sighing into it. "Oh, what have I done? I came out for a simple drink, and I ended up embarrassing myself. I do apologize that you had to bear the brunt of it. I hope the rest of your evening passes without interruption."

"Whatever." Veser shrugged, relieved in a far-off part of his brain. He sucked at the rim of his glass. "Thanks for the drink."

Nodding mournfully, the old man rose to his feet – the spats lay like paper cut-outs over his black boots, who the hell wore those anymore? – with a mild sigh, securing a limp, almost white ten dollar bill from his pocket and placing it on the bar. Veser was scanning the dwindling crowds through progressively fuzzier eyes when a hand came down on his shoulder and made him stiffen up, his own hand slapping down on the bar.

The old man was leaning down next to him, pale face solemn. He pressed his handkerchief back into his pocket and with the hiss of fine fabric, Veser was rushed with another whiff of that dead-leaves smell, twice as sinister.

"Keep yourself safe, young man," he said quietly, white fingers tightening on his shoulder. He stared into his face intently, eyes once more possessed of that sure, hard glint. "There is enough tragedy in your family as it is without you testing the night."

The pressure in the room dropped then rose inexplicably, pushing inwards on Veser's burning stomach and lifting his head off his shoulders, but then the old man had walked past him with his hands clasped at his front, gait stupidly straight considering how much scotch he had thrown down.

Too tipsy to be spooked, Veser waited until he was half-way to the door before glaring after him, yanking his hood up and turning around to the bar. He propped his elbows on it and exhaled noisily, glowering at his cowled reflection. Stupid old guys and their touchiness and their pointless warnings.

His eyes glowed out at him almost accusingly, a noxious poison-apple green. A gift from mommy, and that was probably all that Lee ever saw. He was the only thing she had left the man with, besides the damn sealing ring, and yet here he was. Veser's heart hitched at the thought and he pushed himself to think about important things, like where he was going to sleep that night. He bent to take another drink of his scotch, considering draining the old man's glass too if he was going to be a complete dick that night, but stopped with the glass half-way to his lips.

On the old dude's stool was a silver cigar case, engraved with all manner of fleur de lis with a dignity that perfectly matched its owner, complete with a shy tarnish. Veser reached for it and hefted it in his hand, looking towards the door. Dude was already gone. Mouth screwing up slightly, the half-selkie frowned down at the case.

It wasn't a question of whether he was going to return it – he'd chase after the old guy, maybe get a reward, and if the pervert tried to throw him into his car he'd jinx his ass all the way to San Francisco – but something about the complexity of the latch caught his eye and he was nudging at it with his fingers before he realized it. Veser worked at the gears until the latch gave and the case opened with a delicate click, red velvet lining peeking out like the inside of a throat. Then Veser's eyes widened and the case and his glass hit the floor at the same moment, the crash of glass and crisp ice drowning out the clang of silver. Shouting, Veser threw himself against the bar, nearly falling over when his stool screeched against the old wood of the floor and sent him staggering to the side.

Knocked from the velvet lining, a thick white finger rolled to a stop underneath the old man's barstool, ragged at the bottom with scraps of waxy flesh and circled with a Celtic sealing ring.


	28. Loyalty

A/N: Morning-afters always suck more when there are bullets involved. True fact.

Man, I love Lamont. He's such a stable character, but only for other people. NO MONT, U GET NO STABILITY FOR U.

Also, so much love you guys!

I feel like I got a sudden rash of new readers and I have NO idea what the cause is, but I'm hella thankful anyways. Remember, if you like my humble plot-piddlings, kindly say something, as my epic fics are always Worryingly Flexible and Fairly Terrifying Word Adventures! That means Dead of Night is ever-changing, and what you might think is a fairly innocuous comment will usually if not ALWAYS bring up some concept that I a) forgot b) hadn't thought of c) wish that I'd thought of and will henceforth (and with great amounts of shifty-eyes) pass off as my own personal awesomeness or d) will greatly enjoy smiling about anyways :3

Only you, yes YOU, can prevent wildfires! … I mean, make this a better fic. Yep.

_Warnings: language, some inexcusable behavior with brooms, more Plot that got so uppity from its last two appearances that it insisted it be capitalized, Conrad PTSD, moar MONTTT_

* * *

Loyalty

* * *

Conrad's bed was empty.

Maybe it was the sensation of waking up as the sun set, but an awful weight settled between the coroner's temples as he slowly struggled upright, compounded by a throbbing from below. His leg. Didn't sting as much as the empty place next to him on the bed, strangely enough, but it still made him exhale shakily through his nose and lay back on his pillows like he wasn't ever going to get up.

Luce had been hungry. What was more, Conrad's nausea and bone-level exhaustion and crushing loneliness weren't Luce's problem and he really shouldn't have expected anything more. It made sense that he would take off at the first sign of night. Especially since Conrad had left the curtains open like a fool and, if the myths were any indication, his cherished square of eastern sunlight would have barbequed his vampire guest in bed.

He'd been strong to stay as long as he did. Conrad didn't even want to think about the smell of open wounds and how … _appetizing_ that might have been to one of Luce's kind. It made his stomach hop in place. Luce probably only managed to sleep because he was so exhausted from the fight; otherwise, the smell would have taunted the hell out of him.

His thoughts weighed him into the bed until, staring up at his ceiling, Conrad realized once again what he had the previous night: life went on, and the healthiest thing was probably getting off of his ass before he drove himself to suicide.

Taking a deep breath, Conrad sat up and nudged himself to the side of his bed, grimacing constantly and trying not to jostle his leg. He tried to move his toes and hissed aloud. Surprisingly, after a bit of testing and straining, he found he could walk. If walking consisted of hopping around and leaning helplessly on pieces of furniture.

He could get around, at least, even if work didn't seem to be an option until Luce came back and maybe, you know, gave his leg another go-over with that magical tongue of his.

Conrad didn't even want to think about his call in to the morgue. Was there a separate category for 'injuries sustained while caught in a vampire fight'? It seemed a little painfully ironic for a coroner to not know how he obtained an injury, so faking innocence wasn't an option. He really didn't need the extra attention, either, considering how much security footage had disappeared under his watch.

Glancing up, Conrad was confused to see a lump of dingy white and fur huddled near his closet. It was the coat. The Coat, rather. Even the vampire's shirt and pants were crumpled under it, all smeared with crinkly brown.

Which meant Worth was either still in his apartment … or was roaming the streets naked, which really wouldn't have surprised him.

Biting back a sharp little surge of hope (god, it wasn't even about talking or being with the undead asshole, he just wanted to breathe the same air as someone who had shared the same terrifying experience), Conrad limped to the hallway and called his name, voice hoarse and more quavering than he had anticipated. The idea of Worth being in his condo, naked or not, was suddenly very important to him. Next came the kitchenette and the living room and his office-slash-sketch-room-thing. All empty, clean of even blood-smears.

Unsurprisingly, the last place he checked was the restroom, and not just because of the horrific remnant of the previous night crumpled in the bathtub like some fucked-up Christmas bow. Christ, it looked like a fucking murder scene. Made him waver on his single foot, gut slithering all over the place.

By the time the coroner had hopped all over his relatively small condo, feeling incredibly stupid, his face was shining with sweat and he was creaking alarmingly, the way wooden furniture does before it falls apart. He sat down to rest on his bed for a minute, then closed his eyes and groaned when he saw what he had missed last night: a Tupperware container slicked up with dried blood on his bedside table, right next to his glasses and a pair of tweezers, both carelessly tossed to the side.

The coroner stared at the gruesome synthesis of the utilitarian American and the macabre, cowed and oh-so reluctant, before scooting over, putting on his glasses and reaching for it. The sight of the blood sickened him, but only a little. His body was too overloaded to bother with something as finicky as acute nausea. The sensation was quickly swamped by the burning from his leg and the sense of dread and relief and muffled grey-washed panic he felt looking at the bullet glinting out of a sticky puddle of red-brown tar.

He pulled it up, hating the plasticky stretching noises of the blood, and held it up to the light. It looked old. It was also heavier than he thought it would be. Conrad's heart went faint when he pointlessly reached down and touched it to the bright red splotch on his bandages. Realizing, _this went here_. _I was shot_.

It was in him until Luce reached in and dragged it out, hopefully without causing permanent muscle or tissue damage.

The fact struck a chord within him that Conrad was surprised to find even more raw than the night before, when Luce was literally cutting on him in his own bed. The man was a goddamn _doctor_. From what era, he didn't know, but he knew his shit the way the textbooks could only pretend to. The real deal.

Well, no need to ask what 'Doctor Worth' had helped Hanna with: his pulse, when he still had it. Conrad would assume Hanna had gotten into a lot of trouble when he was alive, if that whole 'look-without-leaping-while-screaming-pointlessly' thing carried over when he died. Luce probably had to put him back together every other day.

Conrad looked up and swallowed, mouth dry. His head pulsed: the last warning before it started to spin. He needed to drink something. Eat something, too, if he could stomach it.

He looked at the dried blood in the Tupperware — oh god, he would never ever be able to eat out of this thing again, _ever_, couldn't Luce have picked one of those awful themed casserole dishes his aunt had given him for Christmas, he had been waiting to put a bullet in one of those for years in one way or another — and gulped. He felt like his own blood had been boiled down to a similar viscous mud, moving at a slow, sticky crawl through his veins. Weighing him down.

Conrad put the bullet back where it was, right into the little negative-space slot in the biggest pool of red (he liked to be OCD about the bullet's placing so he wouldn't freak out about the bullet itself; it was a handy misdirect) then pushed himself to his feet (foot) and prepared to hop to the kitchen. Then he saw Worth's messy pile of clothes again, grimaced at them judgmentally and submitted to another familiar urge.

Cleaning. Cleaning was something good and stable he did normally. Cleaning would make him feel better. Stooping down, he got ahold of Worth's surprisingly heavy coat and opened up his closet one-handed, balancing precariously on one foot and the toes of the other.

He started to clumsily push aside some button-downs, looking for a free hanger, and then jerked back and dropped the coat and slammed the door shut so quickly he nearly caught his fingers in it.

There was something in his closet. Something small. Something pale and furry and nightmarish and tucked into the very back of his best goddamn sweater-vests.

Entire body tingling, Conrad fought his way to the kitchen with stunted hops and seized his broom, teeth clamped together. Back in front of his closet, he paused to breathe in for a moment, making his chest tight and brave, then flung open the door and just shoved the broom into the depths of the tiny closet, furiously smacking it around.

There was an immediate flapping panic, sharp and harried, and then a _scree scree scree_ that just tore down his spine and it was awful and then the thing flapped out and it was a _fucking bat_, a bat in his closet, and then the whole air was grey and muzzy for a minute with a muffled pop.

Terrified as much by the smoke as the sound, Conrad kept thrashing blindly around with the broom, heart slamming in his chest. Outside of Conrad's range of comprehension, someone was shouting "Fuckin' faggot, what the hell is — _fuckin, agh, stop!_" and there were pale flailing limbs and more panic and Conrad's knee gave out. He hit the floor with a curse, pain flaring up his leg and numbing his brain. But still he jabbed and jabbed, until the broom was abruptly wrenched out of his hands and the bristled end slapped against his face, sharp and brittle. It was enough to knock his glasses off his face and shock his mouth open.

"Serves you fuckin' right!"

The business end of the broom hovered in front of his face, trembling slightly. Conrad swallowed heavily, the sting fading from his face. On the other end of his weapon-slash-cleaning-tool, a very blurry Worth was on his feet, wiry hands wrapped tight around the broom handle. Naked. And really, really angry. Livid, actually, or downright murderous.

"What — Luce?" Conrad said incredulously, clammy hand drifting to his cheek. All the jittering fear whooshed out of him, leaving him floating on the floor, horribly confused. "What are you — my closet! There was a fucking _bat_ in my closet! … Oh, Christ. There was a ..."

He trailed off feebly, wondering just how fucking stupid he could be. Luce glared down at him, fangs bared, wordlessly searing a gash through his _soul_ in agreement. Then Conrad pointed up at him accusingly.

"You told me you couldn't turn into a bat!"

"_I lied_!" Luce nearly howled, red eyes glittering. "Didn' want you askin' me to pop back an forth like a fuckin' circus act!"

"What the hell were you doing in my closet? And you're naked!" Conrad exclaimed, thinking in the back of his head that _of course_ Luce would make the most terrifying, demonic bat in the world and he was a little glad this happened like it did because he actually had an excuse to attack him with a broom because he would have wanted to anyways. He didn't catch too much, but what a fucking _sight_.

"I was in yer fuckin closet because ya got _shot_, faggot!" Worth snapped, chucking the broom out of range with equal parts violence and clumsiness, pupils shrinking in rage. "I hadda stay and make sure the bastard didn't come traipsin back an' you weren't 'nough of an idiot ta let him in! God _damn_ it!"

Conrad's bedroom practically shook with the last roar. Luce stood up in his full glory, still glaring poisonously at the downed man and slightly cradling his right arm. Conrad had just enough time to wonder if Luce was vulnerable as a bat and if he had actually hurt his wing-arm-thing with the broom when suddenly the vampire was stalking past him, hands balled into fists. _Still_ naked, Luce crossed the room and jerked open his balcony doors, letting in a gust of cold air.

Leaving?

"Wait!" Conrad cried out from the bottom of his empty stomach, reaching for the vampire's sallow, blurry outline. "Please stay! Please."

His voice was hoarse with how much he meant it. He was scared. Really, truly terrified all over again, because as the sun crept down further, the darker his room became. Luce looked back at Conrad, prickly face unmoved by the desperation in his expression. Wincing, the coroner grabbed up his glasses and dragged himself halfway onto his bed, breathing hard.

"I-I know. I'm pathetic. I know, I'm a faggot, or whatever, but please, Luce, I'm begging you. Stay here. If he can't get in here, this is the safest place for you to be. You can stay with me. I don't care for how long. Until he goes away. I almost …"

_Died_, he wanted to say.

It hadn't hit him; the morning exhaustion and the pain had actually dulled him to it. He had almost _died_. Conrad had read about PTSD and already felt the bullet-pointed symptoms coating his prickling skin, more strongly than the fibromyalgia or Crone's disease that had lurked in magazines and infested his pasty body for a few days after his obsessive consumption of every related article. He could tell his reality was doomed to periodically narrow to the smell of bleach and pin him underneath the vampire hunter all over again.

He was already swamped with the feelings of helplessness and the knowledge that he was still _out there_. He couldn't sleep that way. Couldn't live a normal life.

Framed by the entry whose windows he had broken so often, Luce looked up at the moon sitting fat in the sky, almost full, then back at the coroner.

"Can't."

At Conrad's white, drawn face, the vampire looked back to the deepening night and growled, short and soft.

"Moon's almost full. Shit gets weird about that time. Part of the mutt thing. Can't be round people. When that's over, maybe you'll get lucky."

"But…" The syllable, the gulped refusal, was little more than instinct. Then Conrad's mind raced, surprisingly sharp with full-bore desperation. "Last month, at the bar. And after, in the alleyway. There was a full moon then and you didn't have to go."

"Yeah, 'cos I had a fuckin' totem. Which I lost. Last night," Luce ground out, his dull, half-angry tone finally quieting the coroner. When he was sure Conrad was really down for the count, he pressed restlessly at his right arm and spoke over his shoulder, tone curt and business-like. "Till then, stay off yer leg er use a crutch. Keep inside after sun-down. Go hit up a doc-box for some painkillers. You'll need em, but the spit-thing'll take care of any infections. Change the dressins every six hours."

With that, Luce hopped up on the balcony with powerful pushes of his legs and looked like he was going to _jump_ (naked, into the neighbor's yard?) and then the muffled pop came again and a stringy bat was flapping off into the night.

Still hideous, and still … naked underneath all that scraggly fur.

"Wait, Luce!"

Conrad struggled to his feet and made it to his balcony, but the bat was long-gone. He had wanted to apologize. Sort of.

Mostly, he just wanted to make sure that Luce knew that he was really the one who was in danger.

"Don't you … need your clothes?" he asked the city, straining to hear the flapping of wings long after they were gone. More importantly, he wondered how the terrifying vampire hunter had come into Luce's life – and what marks the monster had left behind.

* * *

Worth had flapped in and transformed naked too many times for Lamont to count.

Nosing his way under the scummy glass, his best-friend-by-default would pop back the second he got past the cracked street-level window, so of course that meant a whole room's worth of naked, pacing vampire. Lamont had learned to not even waste the effort rolling his eyes and just be grateful a customer wasn't with him.

Just turning the page was practically habit by now, triggered by little more than the squeak of hinges and that muffled coughing noise and the slap of bare feet on cracked concrete.

"Forget your clothes somewhere again?" Lamont asked blandly, scribbling down information someone had requested. It happened a lot with Luce, apparently. Lamont had vaguely wished he had good enough times that he forgot _all_ of his clothes, and then figured he could do without the brain damage.

Luce snarled at him and stalked to the back room, slamming the door behind him. Lamont actually looked up and over, thick brow arching. Touchy. That was unusual.

The supernatural contractor pushed on with his pile of requests and orders, a little proud of himself for getting up so early in the evening. He didn't exactly wait on Worth, but did glance up when the back door opened again and delivered a fully-clothed vampire into the main office.

"Glad to see you had some spares," Lamont commented, smiling a little as he watched Worth tug unhappily at his long grey thermal sleeves. A present from him, actually, to help fight the constant cold and hopefully cut down on any bat-in-shirt bonding. Unfortunately, what resulted only confirmed his belief that Worth's penchant for hitching rides in his best polos was so much more about torturing him than staying warm. Still, no one could say he hadn't tried.

Worth gave a grumbling little woof, just to have the last word, and sat his non-existent ass down on the edge of his desk. Lamont briefly considered shoving him off, if just to cheer him up, but actually wanted to be productive that night. Starting a fight didn't sound like the best of plans.

Besides, he had been preternaturally calm lately, possibly due to another 'client' who had Worth's same uncanny habit of teasing all of his aggression out and burning it away. Maybe it ran in the species, who knew?

"Think germaphobe's on my trail again," Worth spoke up after a long while, voice hoarse.

It was too sudden: mind swilling around long dark hair and the smell of sandalwood, Lamont was picking between the two possible construction companies that would be least likely to flip shit at receiving orders from gnomes, and then he was staring up at Luce's thin starved back, eyes wide. His mouth fell open.

"_What_? Abner?" he demanded, back of his neck prickling. "Abner fucking Vanslyk?"

"The one an only, thank god fer that," Luce muttered around his finger, absently nipping at his thumbnail.

"Holy shit." The curse was nearly a gasp, and the papers in Lamont's hands dropped onto his desk. He said it to himself again: _Abner Vanslyk_. "What makes you think that?"

Worth finished his nail and spat it out before answering, glaring down at the rough edge.

"Th'fact he was breathin' down my neck last night an I hadda rip off a quicky-mart ta get some rice fer 'im ta play with."

"Damnit, Worth! He's not on your trail, he's on you!" Lamont exclaimed hoarsely, pushing himself up from his desk with a screech of his chair. He slapped his forehead, then yanked his hand through his thick swath of hair all the harder seeing Worth's slack stance and complete absorption in his absurdly-long nails. Fuck, he was _in the city_.

"How could you let this happen?"

"Ain't any _lettin_ involved, bugger either finds you er he doesn't," Worth snapped back, hackles popping up then abruptly, tiredly creaking back down, leaving him surly and hunched. He crossed his arms, scowling. "And if ya hadn't noticed, he's got a bituva stubbornness issue and I'm his favorite person in th' whole wide world. Was only a matter'a time 'fore he tracked me here, and that's somethin' he's got a lot of."

"I just – rgh!"

Barrel chest bursting, Lamont pushed his palms into his eyes and growled through his clenched teeth, then sucked in a deep breath. Letting it out, he planted himself behind his desk and stared holes in the back of Worth's head. He began again in a tone traditionally used to point things out to a child, gesturing slowly.

"Worth? This is bad. This is very bad. You know I've kept tabs on Abner ever since you mentioned him and his mysterious vendetta against you? That was about five years ago. It took me about three _weeks_ to realize that Abner Vanslyk is a very bad thing, and every week since then has only built on that. There are creatures out there spawned from the very pits of hell, _literally the pits of hell_, that can only touch the edges of what that guy can do, and he's _in town_."

"Fuck, Mont, which one of us is deaf and dumb? You wanna put it in big font and add some cartoon'sa me gettin' staked? Shut up already. Ain't like yer the one in the cross-hairs."

"And I'm not allowed to care that it's you? Christ, the only reason he won't go after me is because of that idiotic creed he has —"

"Wouldn't call it idiotic iffit keeps yer poor ass alive," Worth muttered, spitting out another nail and starting on his knife-like pinky, red eyes pinned on the water-weakened crack in the opposite wall. "And I'd cut the Christ-callin thing if he's gonna be sniffin' around. He's slippin' hard and fast and I hear he makes special exceptions fer heretics, but who doesn't?"

In comparison to his own chaotic rabble of thoughts, Lamont could practically feel the blank space that was the vampire's mind. A low hum, and nothing more. He was seized with an urge to shove Worth away from the desk and throw a punch, if just to kick-start the survival instincts that should have been electrifying his skinny frame. Just to get him moving, get him _caring_ about himself and not leaving the whole burden of flipping shit about the both of them on _his_ shoulders. Fear rose slow and toxic in his gut, lighting the paranoid edges of his mind brilliant orange. He needed to seal his doors, set up alarm spells. The thought of Abner Vanslyk 'slipping' was enough to justify an immediate relocation to Wisconsin.

Lamont bit it all back and stopped himself before he used his balled fist, instead setting it very, very carefully down on his desk.

"Alright. Fine," he grit out.

He could tell when Worth wasn't going to help him, and this appeared to be one of those times, if not the worst time. Giving up, he hung his head after a moment, voice hollowing.

"I just don't get it. Last I heard, he was pulling out all the stops and going after a really important sire. Someone way up there, single-digit generation."

"Sounds about right. Said he had some important shit ta do in the city. There was some flack about doomsday, but he's definitely aimin' ta kill someone round here an' he wants it done fast."

"What?" Lamont asked, perplexed. "How do you know?"

"We stopped ta chat, in between swappin' recipes an' bullets," Worth said dryly. Lamont grimaced, irked.

"Damnit, Worth. You should be grateful he's put off his vendetta to chase after this other asshole. Do you even know why he wants to kill you?"

"I got this cute habit'a pissin' people off fer no good reason," Worth sniffed, pushing himself away from Lamont's desk and scratching doggedly at his chin, which was dark with the honest beginnings of a beard. "I think I might'a told'a dirty nun joke er summat an' he got his panties in a twist. S'all kinda fuzzy, s'been a while."

"All I'm saying is this might be a little bit easier to deal with if we knew why he wanted _your head in particular_ on a stake."

"Cos it'd look exter pretty."

Lamont's expression darkened, big shoulders dropping. The part of him that wanted to reach out and strangle Worth died back to a low, shielded rumble. Realizing the vampire's mental withdrawal was set in stone – he wasn't going to get any more out of him, with or without blows, because Worth just didn't want him involved which was pretty fucking stupid because _he was already neck-deep in it_ – Lamont turned and, just to move his feet, went to the fridge for a bottle of water. He yanked the door open, bending down.

"You won't be cracking jokes when your sweatervest gets involved."

Glancing over towards the yellow buzzing glow of the fridge light, Worth frowned uncomprehendingly and tried to remember owning a sweatervest or _looking_ at one, then realized it was Sweatervest. Capitalized. Which meant the coroner.

Conrad fucking Achenleck. The little bugger had his coat. Worth's eyes narrowed. Bottles clinked in the fridge, a sure sign that Lamont had opted for a bubblier kind of water.

"You know Abner doesn't have any qualms about exploiting social connections and that guy would last about three seconds with that creepy ghost-rat after him."

"Few minutes, actually, but only 'cos Abby wanted a little exercise."

"You don't – shit. Wait."

"Superfang already found him," Worth supplied before the man's jaw unhinged itself. He wheeled around on his heel. Lamont was frozen halfway to his desk, expression stricken but unraveling the higher his uncertainty built. He searched the vampire's face and found nothing, then put his big hands out.

"And … he's dead?"

"Naw, but he's whinin' about it so much I might jus' put him outta his misery. Took a bullet to the leg," he said, voice dull. Mont fell into his desk chair, set his beer down and put a hand to his head, brows cinching.

"Christ. He works fast. Do you know where he is? Sweatervest, I mean?"

Worth nearly rolled his eyes. _It's ten-o-clock, do you know where your pet fag is?_ The more pressing question was _where the fuck is God's Fanged Hand on Earth?_

"Yeah. Told 'im ta stay inside. He's all bundled up in his lil east-town doll-house, probably bitchin' himself hoarse about his sheets er whatever," Worth grumbled. Lamont seemed satisfied, or at least the corners of his mouth had stopped racing for his jaw-line in that idiotic disapproving mother way. That had to have been the reason why Worth looped his thumbs into his pockets and popped his neck and said, "He'll weather. Think he's a bit tougher than he looks … Y'know. Not considerin' how he looks."

The vampire finished with another sniff and the cavernous office was silent for a moment. As Lamont studied his friend, he realized there was something coiled in Worth's starved, scar-hatched arms and the stoic set of his jaw that only eight years' worth of experience could interpret. Trying to think over what he had just been told, he looked between his desk and Worth a few times before rubbing at his lightly-furred arms and giving a weak shrug.

"I'm … sorry."

"Fer what."

Flicking over to him, Worth's red eyes were guarded and curious at the same time.

"I mean, you … he must mean something to you, right?" Lamont said, round face both cautious and honest.

Worth made an immediate _feh_ noise, then actually stared at the dingy concrete floor, finger scraping his chin.

"Somethin'," he repeated gutturally. Then he shrugged. "He sure is an easy lay, that's fer certain. Y'jus poke him and he rolls over. And he's got … whassat disorder where ya spit out random shit?"

"Tourettes?" Lamont said, looking increasingly horrified that he had answered at all, and under what context. Worth smirked around his fangs.

"Yeah, he's got fuck-Tourettes. S'pretty fuckin' funny."

"Thanks for the over-share, Worth," Lamont said, voice flat. He mentally kicked himself for answering the query in the first place: he didn't really need to imagine the details of his vampire BFF having gay sex with a coroner. It was just a little too morbid for him.

"Don' worry yer greasy head 'bout it, Mont," Worth was saying, lip curled. He turned and began to walk back to his room, drawing Lamont's tired eyes. "Yer safe an' I've ditched Abner before. I'll deal with it."

"Like you're dealing with Hanna?"

Lamont's pause and his forcibly blank tone made it clear that he hadn't forgiven Worth yet – if, possibly, ever. Worth looked over his shoulder and found the ex-delivery boy staring up at him, dark gaze steady and harrowed and, in his wordless way, cautionary.

"Like I'm dealin' with Hanna," Worth repeated gruffly, his own challenge equally clear in his posture alone.

It said he was tired, but he'd beat the shit out of Lamont if he really insisted on it, which was enough to make his friend drop his head and stiffly take a token file out of his desk. Lamont-speak for 'okay, whatever'.

The bubble of tension sagged between them, bleeding out. Lamont sighed through his nose and slumped back, wondering how the hell he was going to work knowing that someone was tracking Worth's every step, and possibly his own. Already, he could feel the cramped, maddening check-the-lock-three-times jitter setting in. Especially in the context of his frequent … visitor, who had an equal amount to fear from a vampire hunter, considering her blood-generation.

At a loss, he scrubbed at his scalp again, scowling. Apparently that motion sent up a wave of _something_ because Worth turned around mid-step, head cocked.

"You got a new girl. What'ser name?"

Lamont didn't even need to look up to see the predatory gleam in Luce's eye. This subject was an old habit, and something that was probably the perfect distraction considering how drastically their lives were about to get fucked up the ass. But as sorry as Lamont felt for him, he wasn't going to play into it. A better mood was not worth the scorch-marks in his self-esteem at the moment.

"None of your business." Lamont frowned a minute before looking up, putting as much steel in his eye as he could. "And I mean that."

"Wot, yer serious about 'er? Ya talked ta yer dick about that yet? Ya know he always gets the last word with you," the vampire snickered haltingly, sniffing again in that unnervingly _intent_ way. "Ya gave her half'a yer cologne at least, that's a step ta commitment, yeah?"

"You want to tell me the last time we had sex? Because really, I forgot," Lamont said dully, glaring at him outright. He had a ridiculous store of unpleasant memories of Luce using his super-nose and asking him about his sexual encounters, not always in private. Sometimes, it took a fist in his face for him to get the hint, and even then it was a little counter-productive. This time, Worth just quirked a brow, expression almost spurned.

"Well, hell, she must be pretty bad at it," Worth grumbled, and that was it. Lamont waited for an obnoxiously ambiguous offer to show him how it was done, but it never came.

Shoulders slumped, his roommate turned to leave. Lamont watched him pad over to the yellowing fridge and tear out a blood packet from a fully-wrapped shipment that had nothing to do with him (Mont didn't even sigh, he'd become too used to Worth taking what he wanted whenever he wanted it and leaving claw-marks in the process). Worth popped it open and took a few gulps with a disgusted look on his face, but even that wasn't as spirited as it should have been. His face was truly flat, weighed down.

Something was wrong – or maybe he'd never seen Worth legitimately worried before without the protective glint of anger, and had to wonder why he was lacking the more productive emotion with a psychotic hunter after his very blood.

"Hey, Worth."

Lamont spoke up when the vampire neared the door to the back room. Worth grunted in response, hanging back. His thin back was bowed in a skeletal hunch, stick-thin arm propped against the frame.

Already, two of the nails he'd bitten off had a fine line of white growth on them. His narrow toes were armored with freakishly long, thick claws. His hair was messy, competing in scruffiness with the darkening layer of hair on his face.

"Moon's almost full."

"Thanks, mum," Worth snapped sullenly, and the slam of his personal door zinged through the office concrete, leaving Lamont staring after him with an uncomfortable and vaguely terrified emotion sitting high in his throat.

He tried to go back to his work, but kept looking over at his friend's door. At first it was just staring, then it progressed worryingly to thinking. Lamont wasn't pondering about Abner, surprisingly – though maybe he would have been, if he hadn't seen Worth dig into that bagged blood for the thousandth time with that same revolted expression. Instead, a delayed epiphany fretted at the lines that connected Worth and the stuck-up coroner, Sweatervest.

Because really, maybe he had been exaggerating about the whole 'tearing people apart' thing, and shouldn't have been so quick to pull what he had begun to realize was, actually, a bitch move.

It was a combination of his own stifled fears about vampires and the prickly front Worth put up, maybe, that led him to buy into all the rumors about his friend – the rumors that Worth truly made no effort to correct. Considering that, there was a chance Lamont had been wrong about a core tenet of Worth's being, just because of the vampire's pointedly careless, hedonist attitude. It had served them both for many years – keeping people away from Worth for both Worth and anybody else's sake – but maybe it was time to look a little deeper.

Yes, he had an addict's personality and his immortality only took self-mutilation to new heights, but, as much as the surly vampire loved being released from expectations and reality, Lamont had to consider the possibility that Luce Worth had the most control _ever_ when he finally came down again. How else could a vampire continue to be a doctor even after he was turned? With Hanna, it had never been an issue, because the magic dirtied his blood and Worth had complained of his smell often.

But to face up to all that blood all the time, _after_ countless nights of not draining people dry? He hadn't experienced sucking the last bits of life out of anybody, but from what he heard it was pretty fucking hard to stop at the finish line.

Doing the math with a grinding slowness Worth would have snidely credited to his aborted high-school education, Lamont had to wonder what had happened to him that birthed his strict views about killing, especially in direct conflict with his pleasure-seeking wiles. The contractor felt a brief, pointlessly delayed jolt of guilt for selling Worth out so cruelly to anybody, much less Sweatervest, whom he legitimately seemed to have a thing for. As much as Worth could have 'things'.

Then his thought-train expanded: if Sweatervest had been able to get over his yellow-journalism warnings, hadn't been eaten alive in a month and a half _and_ Worth had saved him from Abner, Lamont was struck with the notion that maybe he should be considering wedding invitations.


	29. Awake

A/N: My god, Worth, how is your mind is still intact?

NOW YOU SEE WHY LUCE ISN'T THE SHARING TYPE, CONRAD, GO BACK TO YOUR FAGGY SKETCHING GOD.

_Warnings: language, disturbing imagery, violence, some legit aboriginal culture (that gave me fucking goosebumps when I realized how perfectly it worked for this), gratuitous amounts of rolling in spooky vampire shit aka literary wanking. Also, with passing accuracy, I can say that Worth's afore-referenced-but-never-mentioned aboriginal nickname consists of 'malkamalka' (striped) and 'pach' (white) but if there are any aboriginals in my audience, please do me the favor of calling me out._

_…Please tell me there are aboriginals in my audience._

PS: Swear the Worthfest has stopped, Hanna and Zombie concert-teims are next.

* * *

Awake

* * *

He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was a woman's hand in front of his nose, fingers folded gently. His glossy soundless tunnel-vision drifted further and, beyond the simple cotton strap of her shift, he saw her brown irises pinned two feet above him, wide and waxy. Her dark hair was tangled over her white forehead and her lashes were gummed together; he smelled salt in the seams between them, almost delicate.

Then, like an afterthought, the red appeared, drying on her torn throat and matting her white shift to her front in a rich brown crinkle.

Entire body materializing around him in a single convulsion, Luce breathed in sharply and kicked out, shoving himself away from the corpse. His back hit something and his nerves bit back; he slapped his hands to it, feeling-hearing-smelling wood and tracing the echoes through the tangle of compacted dead fibers. His head snapped to the side and he nearly caught his ear on a wooden beam inches above his cheek.

Dark. Close. He sucked in air and it brought too much _information_ with it, like a musky coppery smell that turned sour in his dry throat. It made his stomach crumple up in a panic, but two wooden stands stood below at his feet, placed a familiar distance apart. A corner of light blue fabric hung down below the frame.

A bed. He was underneath a bed.

It took a minute to comprehend _a bed_, to put himself back in places where people walked. It was so different from the slick walls of the cavern that he almost reached out to touch the dry bolt of wood, then Luce saw her again. His hand jerked back to his chest and, very carefully, fighting with his unresponsive body, he edged out the bottom of the bed, a slow shiver building in his chest.

He grit it away, dogged, but that small bit of _himself_ fell away when he rose to his feet, staggered and reached for the bed. His dry hand tangled in fabric and, underneath, he felt a pliantness and complexity (the plush density of flesh and the secret scrape of bones deep underneath) that was distinctly _human_. He looked down.

In the bed, under his hand, was a motionless child sprawled in a ring of rumpled bedding and red.

Luce choked out a curse and staggered backwards, panic putting his ribs in a vice. Or so it felt like: his heart should have been pounding but his body was slow, infuriatingly unresponsive. Clammy. The smell was awful, stronger now. He looked around at the destroyed sleeping area, the smashed mirror and the clothes strewn over the floor, and felt unrest rise in him. Enough to battle the numbing fear. Enough alertness to ask questions.

What the hell was he doing there? Who had done this and why hadn't they done it to him? Even in all his years of being peripheral to tribe conflicts, he had never seen anything so brutal, and his eyes could remain on the little girl and the woman for no longer than a second before flinching away. It was dark outside, but it had been long enough for blood to dry. Not long enough for decay to begin, so what was the smell? The thought that someone was likely to come and pin him for this persevered through the horror building at the base of Luce's throat.

And if the Coat had done it, he would be back for him. Saw what he did to the girl, no matter if it was all a smear of shadows and pain now. Still, he started to get a grip on the creak of the wooden floor and the quiet blue night around him as he crept through the house, even getting up the nerve to call out, voice destroyed. He felt like he was in a void, back in the cave again, and going deeper with every step. Still as far from civilization as he had been, and worse still.

Then he found the father.

There was something about the curl of the man's meaty hands and the gun two feet from his curled fingers that chased Luce out of the room and pushed him flat against a wall, skinny fingers dug into his hair. He was in a bad place, in a bad state. A bad way. Christ, what the hell had happened? Clenching his eyes shut, he tried to think. Tried to remember what had brought him there.

He woke up after dying, or after he thought he had died. Didn't exactly know how anyone could've survived that, but there he was. Always had a knack for making it through the unthinkable.

He remembered laying exactly where he fell after _it happened_, swamped by the memories and wincing away from the echo of the tearing sensation at his neck. There was something dried on his face, a long fat flaky drip down the side of his nose and around his mouth. He wiped it off. Blood.

Staring up at the glittering edge of one of his mixing bottles, which was hanging over the side of the desk, he remembered pushing tentatively at his neck (only a rough line, better than he thought) and, once the fear in his stomach settled, being so bloody hungry.

It was alien to him; hunger had never once in his life rose above an annoyed turn of his stomach but this feeling was enough to wither his tough body. It made his very bones shake as it crawled up his spine and wound around the base of his skull like a crackling creeper vine, turning ever tighter and filling his mind with an unimaginable pressure. Made it feel like breathing didn't do anything, certainly didn't do anything to get rid of the empty feeling clawing up his insides.

He couldn't even be grateful he had survived the monster; he needed something. He needed it then or else his survival would be a false-start.

At some point he remembered the girl. He crawled toward her broken body, unable to flatten out his stomach to stand. Thinking maybe she was still alive and it had all been a hallucination… or it was the smell that led him there that his mind had tried to disguise with human thoughts. He got to her and, no. None of it had been a dream.

Luce dropped his head with a low, guttural noise, letting his exhaustion roll through him. The cold underneath his palm became wet and he looked down. Blood welled between each of his fingers, bright red. The sight stopped him cold.

Before he knew why or how, he was bending to his hand, smelling the wet sheen with his entire body and then pushing his mouth to it, licking and sucking the lines-grooves-veins in his palm.

Then – explosive over his tongue, a foulness that didn't have a name. Luce gagged viciously, scraping his elbow as he jerked backwards from the red blood. It still reflected the cold moonlight sharply, pure in color but now he could smell the rankness pooling along its surface. Dead. It was dead and she was dead and she had been sick.

Recovering himself, Luce spat it out, stomach only cramping more brutally as he looked up to the sliver of night sky above him, encased by black rock.

_Gonna die_, he thought definitively for the first time in his life, and the hour of groping around in the dark, trying to get _up_ through all the paths he'd tried a thousand times before, only affirmed it. The cave was the quietest place on earth and he didn't want to throw the girl's body into the chasm. He physically couldn't take her sticky flaccid arms and drag her and roll her body into the black like he did the red-speckled and gore-clotted rib-cages of cows, but he didn't want to rot with her. Couldn't wait for her to bloat and warp while he wasted away.

He could feel the cavern, how deep it went. How bloody deep.

Luce scrambled at the bottom of his grave, every breath and scrape maddeningly audible as the reality of it all — the heaviness of her wet body, the height of the cavern walls – set in. The rock was blacker than ever and cut his feet, his hands, and the smell drove him mad. That smell turned into a dagger that didn't bleed him dry, because he had nothing left to empty himself of, but brought him to a burning panic. It combined explosively with the hunger and his furious collisions into the black cavern walls and his senseless screams over one night and then two. He couldn't say how the days had passed, but remembered how he shrank away from the barest beginnings of light like a sick dog. Even the reflection off the stone was enough to make him want to retch and he knew he'd hit his head again but before he could finish the thought, he was unconscious and then he was mad again, too far gone to curse or remember words as the endless night began again, far above him. Then he blacked out — or whited out. Lost himself.

There were nightmarish images of his fingers getting longer and longer as he scrabbled at the walls, a feeling of his shoulders lifting up and becoming skeletal, formed into hardened spikes by his bitter desperation.

Everything after was tangled, nothing but a sensory smear. Incomprehensible.

Remembered fighting past black and soaring over rippling spans of low rustling sounds, all blue. Remembered smelling, then ripping. Remembered red. Remembered roaring satisfaction, high exaltation, a glee so dark and corrupted and crystalline that it hardly seemed a human body could hold it. At the mere memory, every muscle in his body tightened with an exultant thrill, gut churning.

Remembered not being hungry anymore.

Luce Worth fell back against the wall and pushed his hand to his mouth, dirty fingers clamping tightly over his nose to shut out the smell. The smell, cloying and indescribably cold, _wrong_ in that same way that the dead sick shiela's blood had been, was in every molecule of the air. But he choked and snapped back from his own hands, which were rank with it. He looked down, eyes widening. What he thought was dirt was flaky brown but glinted with a secret red. The same color spilled down his front, white skin showing through cracks in the thin substance.

The monster had bitten him, and now there was an entire family torn apart around him and his hands were covered in dried blood.

Sudden as a blow, the slam of his own footsteps chased Luce outside where he stumbled and tripped over the porch steps, twisting as he fell. His mind burned, but he couldn't make a sound. He fell onto his back and could feel every grain of dirt scraping along his skin like a land-slide; the fabric of the night shook with that same piercing _cree-cree-cree_, stabbing relentlessly into his ears and working its way into the very shivering grass like a twitching mold while the mice and the moles pushed through the shifting-scraping dirt and pawed at their waxy rustling whiskers with their hard paws and he screamed hoarsely into the night sky, hallucinating that he could hear the stars burning in their vacuum.

Hyperventilating, Luce forced his eyes open and for a split-second he thought it was daytime, but the stars were out and the sun was halved. The white moon above him burned so brightly he couldn't look directly at it, a milky color-soaked halo exploding from its edges and making him feel sick. The light jabbed into his temple and he rolled over and he could feel something inside of him _slosh_ and just that heavy, clammy sensation made his throat close up.

Jabbing his hand to his gut, he heaved into the dirt, forcing it up; his stomach pulsed and something spilled over his bottom lip. He choked and pushed more of it up, heavy and sticky, vomiting until he opened his eyes and saw a black pool between his hands and a slippery thread of blood hanging from his chin.

He stared at it, entire self locked into its nauseating sway, and all he could see and feel was bending over after a fight with Dan, spitting thickly into the red dirt and laughing, entire body humming and ready to wheel round and give him one for. Warm orange, noisy. There was something in the memory – and it wasn't just the colors, wasn't just the sensation – but he suddenly felt a thousand miles away from that man. Now, there was something present, and something missing.

When that faded, leaving him with a far more terrifying feeling or lack of one, Luce realized he was holding his breath. Had been for minutes.

As fervently as he spit the blood out, he sucked air in, but it didn't ease the stillness inside of him. Luce slammed his hand to his chest, kept his palm there just long enough to feel _nothing_ before slamming again and again, harder and harder, faster and faster. The impacts built up inside his cramping-curling-cavernous chest until he had to scream again, raw and deep, digging his fingers into the grass and the ground. No matter how he emptied himself of sound and vibration, there was no corporeal crumple of his insides, no crunched feeling. The void remained, silent and solid in his gut.

Shivering madly, he slumped back on his knees and, blood slick on his chin, raised his hand up to the light. No matter how blue the cast of the night, he could see the bloodlessness, the powdery opaque white of his skin. Perfectly still, down to his bones.

The skin of his wrist split effortlessly beneath his needle teeth, hard and white-feeling in his dry, aching mouth… then sealed itself back together before his eyes.

He didn't know when he pushed himself to his feet, but Luce was suddenly running back through the shadowy house, naked arm pressed over his nose as the smell rose around him, souring further every second. Poison. Dead things.

_Don't eat_, his blood – their blood – told him.

As he ran, Luce remembered the time when he had walked to the Danggali camping grounds with a fag hanging from his lip and his pack swinging from his shoulder, sun hard on his back and a deeper busy warmth underneath his skin, and saw the unthinkable. The horizon was oily with heat and he broke into a run, bare feet slamming over the hard earth. His pack hit the ground with a sharp clatter, tools scattering in a trail behind him, but the sound was nothing compared to the crackling roar.

The entire camp was rioting with flame, stick structures crackling and collapsing and Luce drew back from the heat instantly, coughing. Squinting through the massive wave of heat, he just barely saw the long-legged, rippling silhouettes of the last of the tribe, men he knew. He ran even with them, close enough to see the white stripes on their arms. Their dark faces were wet with sweat but solemn and immovable, hands tight on their walking sticks. Their shoulders were bleeding, fresh marks atop old bulging scars.

Set the fire themselves. Medicine hadn't worked. _He_ – Koche, though spirit law forbade them from saying his name, it had to be Koche and he was the only one Luce had seen in upwards of a week – was dead. Too much bad feeling there. Rest of the tribe gone. Had to burn down the camp so his spirit wouldn't follow them.

Had to leave, malkamalka pach.

Struck dumb, Luce couldn't do anything but watch and then throw curses after them, voice cracking. Anger, clotted helplessness, sharp shame that it had to be Koche; the man had been his friend and he didn't have many of those. The heat in the air ate up his words like cinders and the two aboriginals disappeared over the yellow line of the horizon but Luce felt that same crushing urge to run after them as he crashed around in the cold blue kitchen, the only person in the world all over again, and grabbed up an oil lamp.

He crashed it at the base of the window, but it was just a splash. Scrambled until he found the cool clay oil jar and slopped the rank liquid over the floor of the sparse farm house, mind refusing to register the weightlessness of something that should have been tearing at his shoulders. It spilled over his feet, washing away the blood and mingling it, slippery, with the oil. He threw the jug aside when the flow slowed to a dribble and grabbed for the matches sitting on the glistening stove, striking one and staring into the yellow seed of light before throwing it to the floor.

He smelled it catch and heard the fwoosh of devoured air as it spread up the wall and was running past the bodies of the people he had killed before he could feel the heat.

Back outside with the black sky yawning above him, Luce skidded to his knees and turned around to watch the orange eat up the side of the house, eyes wide and dry. As the sight started to sink in, so did the terror: the blind, acrid terror that said that he should have taken their bodies somewhere and left time to ease their flesh away, like the tribes did. He remembered the way they secreted the bodies away so reverently, constructing the platforms with a hollow tirelessness and a strength he'd never known, then buried the remaining bones with no less respect. Let them return to the earth.

It seemed right, as right as the fire was suddenly sinister and wrong, tearing through their flesh and forcing their helpless, angry spirits up and out so they could follow him for forever, hiding in the night air like the smell that would never wash from his breath. Whispering, hissing, crackling, orange. Inside, forever.

The uncomprehending grief in him rose so strong that Luce choked, reeling inside his cold body. The flames crawled higher and higher, consuming the small house and the life it had held. He was a murderer. He had done a lot in his life, but he had never ended another.

Luce felt something hit his hand and looked down; a spot of red glistened against his white skin. Wiping at his eyes painted his fingertips the same color. He stared at the blue-washed red that had come from his body, shaking.

The color made him remember.

He'd seen so many things, but the sight of an abo tribe in mourning was forever branded on his memory. When someone died, the abos painted themselves white, palming handfuls of sticky white clay onto their rich brown skins and smearing it down to a pale streak. A bit of a ghost, a stripe of sadness in a land that so rang with color. They cut themselves on their shoulders to show their pain, but Luce was already painted, his every cell drained down to a colorless cry, a nothing.

A dead thing, dead as ash, and his blood wasn't his own to spill anymore.

Eyes brimming red, Luce Worth waited until the house was burning hot enough to bleed out along the horizon like a sunrise (when the sun came and left was the time the Dreaming was strongest, strong as Koche's white smile in his kind chiseled face), then heaved his empty body to its feet and ran away from the light, the slam of his bare feet echoing on and on and on in his chest.


	30. Show Time

A/N: OH MY GOD, I KNOW. I'M SORRY. 'Oh yeah totally, concert is coming soon!' Fifteen chapters later? FFFF.

Ah, Toni! I just really like her and I really like this. Alternate Universes are so much fun, you can swap and slide as you please and make characters witness events and sometimes CAUSE events that they never would have had access to previously. Love it. Had a lot of fun playing with this one.

_Warnings: language, violence, scary themes, More Adorable GalaHanna bonding, Hanna squeeing, God unZombie can I marry you, and then the GIRL showed up and interrupted the supernatural sausage-fest! Hooray!_

_Also, Plot, would you just go away and leave my fangirling alone seriously? You are being way too demanding._

* * *

Showtime

* * *

At first, the Detective genuinely regretted that he had to take a late Friday shift on the day of the Moonlighter's concert.

Then, when he came home and Hanna nearly slammed him into the wall, eyes bright enough to blind, he realized that working had probably been a better course of action. It certainly seemed less stressful than sitting through twelve-plus hours of the zombie, who had reverted to a foot-tapping toddler state and _just couldn't make time go any faster than it was currently going and that was irritating no seriously there has to be a spell for that or something because oh my god, Carlos, The Moonlighters_. Though it took the Detective until that moment to realize that Hanna's 'two weeks' was twice as long as anybody else's when the zombie didn't sleep, it was still a little frightening.

The older man felt like he barely escaped with his life after two hours of Hanna in such a manic state, and when they got in the car and Hanna nearly broke his fingers off (a realistic danger) trying to insert two CDs at once, his partner started to delicately dread the concert itself.

It was strange, then, to see all of that hectic energy fall to a flat buzz outside the skinny zombie's body when they actually pulled up in front of the whirling lights of the massive concert building. Once out of the car and standing in line for the entrance, Hanna did little more than gaze around, blue eyes wide, with his stick-thin green limbs drawn close to himself and his face carefully blank. His partner would have asked after the sudden change, but the rabble of brightly colored skins and wigs and checkered irises sucked up all of his attention the moment they stepped into the concrete ticketing area, which was bursting with costumed teenagers. Of course there had been a few straggling decorations at the station, but the older man had altogether forgotten it was two days before Halloween.

Both of the investigators gawked in silence until a crowd of kids surged by and Hanna jerked back from a punch on his shoulder, expression nearly aghast.

"That is a fuckin' rad costume! How'd you get your eyes like that, man?" a patchily-green alien shouted over the roar, his three pipe-cleaner antennae waggling and bobbing spiritedly atop his tin-foil headdress. Behind him were a witch who _must_ have been freezing and a cowardly lion who looked more drunk than cowardly, both staring at him with unabashed amazement.

"LED's!" Hanna shouted back after a beat, a little confused.

"Awesome! Fuckin' awesome! You look fuckin' amazing! You are my number-one zombie dude!" the alien crowed so hard his voice cracked, pointing at him then thrusting his fist into the air. He kept it there until the zombie, grinning awkwardly, reached forward and bumped it with his own. Then, with another scream from the alien, the group tumbled onwards, blown like the scraps of tin foil and gauze that made up their outfits, hooting and hollering.

"Yeah," Hanna murmured after them, head cocked to the side. Then, grin growing on his face, he flung his fists into the air, skimming his partner's jaw and leaving the Detective rubbing at his chin with a crunched half-smile. "_Yeah_!"

After that, it was Hanna at 120% again.

The young zombie shouted and hooted and threw hand-signs out to his costumed fellows, rising to the crackling energy level of the yammering crowd and bobbing there with a grin so set it was as if someone had tightened his cheek stitches. He leapt over every available rail and responded jubilantly to more comments on his 'costume,' making up surprisingly clever answers, while his partner watched with equal parts pleasure and discomfort. While it was good to see him so happy, he doubted that the young people would react so positively if they knew Hanna's green skin was much more than cunningly applied paint.

Thankfully, they found their seats relatively quickly and settled into the second tier of the open-air theater, right next to the railing. While he had no idea how to gauge the price of tickets and thus the quality of the second-hand ones he had paid for (nor the lower-quality ones that had been relegated to him a week later by the company that apologized for the inconvenience but included a 20 dollar voucher with the swap, so he couldn't complain), the Detective was pleasantly surprised by how well they could see the stage. According to Hanna's ceaseless bouncing, the zombie was also immensely pleased. The older man had to wonder why it was being held outside, but then again, the producers probably couldn't have anticipated the below-freezing temperatures on Halloween.

The cold was unusual, almost unnatural. The roofless theater let in the wind and the hard pinpoint stars, which sparkled severely in the black space around the full moon. Still, the colorful attendees hardly seemed concerned.

The Detective was blowing into his gloves and tightening his scarf around his neck when the stage (a mess of black support beams and wires) lit up powerfully, and spooky white fog began to pour off of the floor and into the mosh pit. The screams started shrill and built up to a roar as brilliant blue spotlights cut through the white and rose up, everything culminating in a huge screen flickering on in the background. After a few cursory Halloween images, including a howling wolf and a full moon that looked blue and tinny compared to the fat orangey monster perched above the theater's wall, a pre-show music mix started up and images of the band began to cycle by.

Hanna's partner watched the visual overload inquisitively, gathering data as to what he could expect from the next few hours. As he had expected, the fans were mostly young girls, but the male population was at least noisy enough to imitate a formidable presence. Still, he suspected a good deal of 'girlfriend syndrome.' The Moonlighters themselves consisted of a tall, leggy blonde lead singer, a girl with long red hair who played keyboard, a blond boy drummer and the young woman the Detective couldn't _help_ but know as Toni Ipres, who juggled both a microphone and a svelte-looking blue electric guitar.

Toni seemed to be a fan favorite, judging from the impassioned surge of noise whenever her picture was flashed.

"Man, Frederick. She's so pretty," Hanna sighed wistfully the second time the slide-show cycled around to a picture of Ms. Ipres in a short orange dress, looking challengingly at the crowd with dark almond eyes, long black hair knotted at the back of her head and spiking out at the top. The Detective tilted his head in basic agreement before the small zombie turned to the side and blasted him with words, blue eyes pinned on her ten-foot-tall image all the time.

"You know she's been singing since she was four and they offered her this record deal but she wouldn't take it because she knew they'd make her sing their stuff and she wanted to sing her own stuff and so she held on and was like living in the back of a van until she found an indy company and now she's top of the charts with her band and stuff even though it's not really her band it's Rachael's but it might as well be hers?"

For a moment, all the older man could do was stare at the side of the zombie's stitched-up cheek. When Hanna turned around to see if his partner had caught all of that and found it to be as amazing as he did, his own face abruptly blanked. His skinny green hand buried itself in his bright orange hair and clenched there.

"Woah, jeez! I just remembered something! … Really freakin' useless," Hanna finished with a sigh, drooping forward and putting a hand to his chin. The light of his eyes dimmed, morose and easily outshined by the waving blue beams of the stage. "Leave it to me to memorize tabloids and forget who my parents are."

"At least you're getting the hang of it," his partner said kindly.

"At least Toni Ipres is still awesome," Hanna gushed under his breath, lacing his long green fingers over his mouth and gneeing quietly when the pre-show track switched to one of his favorites.

The Detective smiled, tugged the young zombie's hood over his head and allowed himself to sit back, gloved hands in the pockets of his coat. This had seemed like the perfect thing to distract Hanna from the time in Conrad's morgue, and it was actually working. Yes, this was just what his partner needed — and maybe something he did, too. Just the ability to be in a crowd, doing a public activity at night, was strangely comforting.

Though he had to consider that it was the threat of the alternative that made him enjoy being out at night this much: it kept him from tracing cracks in the green-washed spackling of his ceiling, at least.

He hadn't been sleeping well of late. His dreams were bothering him again, though none strong enough to spawn another fit like a few weeks ago. Hanna hadn't seemed to notice, or at least hadn't needed to come in and shake him awake, and that was somehow important to the older man. He didn't want to worry Hanna, even if he hypocritically expected a higher grade of honesty from the zombie if anything were amiss.

The Detective still preferred being awake and took advantage of cases to pursue that willful insomnia in a productive manner. The last week had been very interesting, surprisingly successful (if he wasn't over-selling their talents or under-selling the amount of butterfly bandages involved in the aftermath) and had driven him further towards people for some unnameable sense of safety. He found himself uncharacteristically attracted to night establishments and electronic screens like an exhausted moth.

But in the noisy concert hall, that most public and incongruous of places, his fears and his desired escape fused in a single instant. Looking over the crowd, his wandering eyes stuck between a young gothic girl and a yellow-winged fairy who was struggling with her oversized props. Suddenly, his gloved hands knotted in his pockets.

A feminine figure in a flowing black dress sat a row away from the two investigators, pale leg angled daintily, face turned away and further obscured by an eerily silky swath of silver hair.

Her hands were small, her skin moonshine-pale. The entirety of the remaining crowd suddenly consisted of shadowed figures, all noise chased away from his hot ears as his vision narrowed drastically to the woman. The Detective tensed in his seat, pulling away from the dark membrane of dream and reality that had suddenly coagulated in the air between them, but then she turned around with a sloppy human movement and her brows were thick above her brown eyes and her mouth was full and bright red. A line of dark texture separated her forehead from the silver hair. As he watched, she tugged at her bangs with a laugh, and her whole hairline and part slithered forward.

A wig.

Before he could even begin to relax, assured of the anonymity of the crowd, the stage lit up again and Hanna rocketed out of his seat with a hoarse scream. Blessed noise scrambled his thought-train, pulverizing his tenuous worries. After some brief introductory banter, the concert was in full swing.

Though it was often hard to hear through all the noise, it turned out that the snatches of music that the Detective caught drifting out of the living room at three a.m. had led him to the proper conclusion about the band's style and age group appeal. Alternative rock, heavy focus on romance, a touch irresponsible with the whining. Hanna's partner sat forward with a vague smile on his face, hands clasped between his knees, and listened and watched.

The Moonlighters weren't his style, perhaps, but the energy was insuppressible and he found himself frowning curiously at some inconsistencies in their performance. He much preferred Ms. Ipres' vocals to the lead singer's, and just when the lyrics became interesting, the next song would be shallow and uninspired. He was also subtly pleased that the songs with complex, allusion-smattered lyrics seemed to be Hanna's favorites, or at least provoked the most hopping and clapping from the utterly overwhelmed zombie.

They were five songs into the concert and two chords into Hanna's _favorite song of ever I mean ever_ when, far off, the pitch of the yells began to teeter and sour like a poorly-executed string bend.

It was quickly lost in the noise. Hanna was busy jumping up and down and howling and making rock signs and the Detective was mostly enjoying him. Then, after checking his watch, he looked over his shoulder. Squinting, he realized that there was an unusual level of ruckus happening in the back rows right before a rough, giant animal shape plowed down the aisle closest to them and a girl screamed so shrilly it made every muscle in his body spasm. Then he heard it: all around him, screams were rising to equal the concert chaos, becoming high-pitched and terrified.

The Detective jumped to his feet and turned around, skin turning cold at the sight of dozens of rough, shadowy dog-shapes snapping at the edges of the scrambling, costumed crowd.

One of them skidded to a stop under a light and the yellow played sharply on the stiff bristles of the creature's fur. It looked like a wolf, only its limbs were grisly and longer than was natural, pinprick eyes glinting bright yellow at the end of a wickedly narrow snout. The Detective groped blindly for Hanna, finally managing to reach backwards and clap a hand onto the tiny zombie's shoulder. His partner whirled around and his grin died on the spot, falling into a flabbergasted gape as his eyes locked on the snarling werewolf and, higher, its fellows, who were lunging at people who were throwing themselves over chairs in a panic to escape out the back.

"Wh — are you _serious_?" Hanna demanded hoarsely; obviously the only thing he could think to say, and the Detective quite agreed with him. Before they could so much as move, screams suddenly split the crowds below them and a second wave of the creatures streamed in from the edges of the dark theater, moving low and feral through the mosh pit. Teenagers fell away from the railings in waves, costumes falling apart as the music screeched into silence, odd guitar notes ringing on uncomprehendingly.

Three werewolves leapt onto the stage, all sinew and dark fur; one of them turned to the crowd and let out a long, piercing howl, which was all that was needed to send the entire building into unimaginable chaos.

"There is something seriously fucked-up going on in this city!" Hanna shouted to his left, and had already jumped the railing before his partner could say a word. The Detective looked down in horror, hands numb on the railing, then vaulted it to join the small zombie in his mad dash for the stage.

The werewolves weren't their only problem: it was tough barreling the opposite way of a mob of people trying madly to escape, but then the werewolves slightly solved their difficulty by jumping into the crowd from all angles and making no clear escape obvious. The relentless flickering of the blue concert lights only intensified the fearful thrashing of shadowed limbs; the Detective felt the screams and the chaos building up inside his empty chest and was off-guard enough to catch an elbow to the gut, which thankfully knocked him back into survival mode.

He pushed forward, one arm over his face, teeth grit. If he had received crowd-control training in his previous life, the finer points must have been lost in the reboot.

Hanna was able to duck under elbows and skirt around knees and pull himself up on stage first. He was already fast at work scribbling on his hand by the time his partner hit the wood next to him, squinting in the bright lights of the stage. Skin horribly tight, the Detective looked around for a weapon of some kind as Hanna skidded forward to blast a crouching furry nightmare off of the drummer with a bright purple light.

"You get off him!" he shouted with an incredible anger, charging forward and firing off several smaller blasts. "Riley's my favorite aside from Toni and a band without their drummer is like fried chicken without coleslaw!"

Hanna's partner dissected the scene as best he could: he could see three werewolves crouched in the shadows, his back was to the crowd and he was distinctly without a notable form of defense. The older man felt his legs warm alarmingly quick from the cage of lights around the edge of the stage and was abruptly breathless, conscious of every foot from the stage to the ground.

Breaking his back was a very real possibility, and there were doubtless more wolves waiting down there – if they didn't decide to preempt his fears and come up and get him themselves.

Reacting to a blur in his periphery, the Detective grabbed up a mic-stand as a werewolf came barreling toward him and he swung as hard as he could, hearing only the high-pitched _yip_ as the metal base cracked it brutally across the jaw. It fell to the stage, legs tangling underneath its caving chest. The older man turned and saw one of the dark shapes streaking towards his partner, who was bent to his arm, scribbling intently. Teeth bared, the Detective ran forward and swiped the werewolf's legs out from under it with a pass of the mic-stand, ramming his foot into its side the second it was down. It wrenched itself up and, snarling, whirled around to snap at him, right where his hand had been a second ago.

Hearing the gravelly noise, Hanna turned around, eyes wide, and reached for the Detective; it was instinct to snatch up the zombie's skinny arm and yank him flat to his chest, running backwards. He nearly crushed Hanna to him as the black-furred wolf slunk over the wood towards them, brown-yellow fangs exposed under the ripple of spit-slick black lip as it growled, low and dangerous.

"Don't let it scratch you! Don't let it scratch you!" Hanna was yelling in his ear, hands wrenched tightly into his collar. "If it bites you or breaks the skin, you'll get the curse!"

The only thing the Detective could think about was how inconvenient it would be to have both a zombie and a werewolf on the same team as he backed away from the werewolf step by step. When it lurched toward him, he kicked out sloppily at the creature and quickly lost his orange shoe to its teeth, sending his socked toes twisting. He cursed and pushed Hanna behind him, hefting the mic-stand in his hands like a baseball bat.

"What are you planning?" he rasped over his shoulder, dark eyes flicking between the crouching shapes that were hemming them in against the edge of the stage. Two then three, then four knotted furry bodies edged closer with stealthy movements, yellow eyes hard and small. Hateful.

"I'm still fixing it," Hanna grit out at his back. "I've never done anything like this before. I don't even understand why this is happening, I've never heard of werewolves attacking en masse like this. I mean, they're usually pack animals, but this many all snapping and snarling at once is just insane!"

As if to assure the small zombie of their violent intentions, two werewolves darted from the semi-circle and leapt straight for the Detective. Hoisting his weapon up, he managed to knock the first away, then cried out as something clamped around his forearm hard enough to splinter bone.

He staggered downwards and struggled against the writhing weight of the werewolf who had bitten him, kicking out at its scrawny body. He could feel its canines digging through the layers of his shirt and jacket, crushing it all by pure pressure, excruciating, and he shouted desperately, wrenching his arm away and slamming the stand repeatedly into the werewolf's back one-handed.

His heart was beating painfully fast when the werewolf twisted away with a whine. He didn't have time to look at the tatters of his sleeve for the bloom of blood; another dark shape flashed to his right and he fought back without thinking, striking out until his arms were numb and he couldn't catch his breath, frigid air stinging in his lungs. Behind him, he could hear Hanna defending the people below them, sizzling noises and the strange tinny zing of magic flickering in his periphery.

At last, if just for a spare second, all four wolves were beaten back, circling them in frustration and wariness as the screams died off in the distance; he had cleared a space for them. Space enough and time enough for Hanna to do whatever he had planned. A ragged relief sputtered through the Detective's aching shoulders and skull until he heard a frustrated sound behind him.

"Oh man, oh no —"

"What is it?" he demanded, voice hard.

"My arms, they're all filled up!" Hanna whimpered, looking between his ink-plastered arms with mounting hysteria. "And I don't think I have enough juice left to do what I planned!"

The fact lodged in the older man's throat, stopping his breath high in his chest. The Detective stared wildly at the growling werewolves for no longer than a second before reaching backwards and dragging Hanna to his side. It was impossible, that they would come here to fail. He threw the mic-stand away, where it clanged into the shadows.

"Use my arm. Use me," he hissed into Hanna's ear. The uncomprehending brightness of Hanna's blue eyes and his lost expression was too much to deal with; the Detective ripped off his shredded coat with a grunt and rammed his sleeve up his arm, shoving the naked wiry limb into Hanna's chest with a roar. "Do it!"

Hanna looked up at him almost helplessly, but found what he needed in the intensity of his partner's expression and the guttural noise rising all around them.

Lip stiffening, the small zombie bent and scrawled a line of rounded runes down his arm, from the hollow of his elbow to the narrow path of his wrist, muttering feverishly to himself. The mutters got louder and, eyes locked on the wolves, the Detective could feel something alarming growing in his arm, a kind of heat that slithered up and up and up. He could feel his breath coming shorter and shorter, but tried to relax and let it in if it was going to save them.

"Put your other arm up, point it at the sky," Hanna ordered, and the older man looked up and felt the depth and coldness of the place above him before thrusting his hand above his head.

Below him, Hanna gripped his wrist hard at the same time as he slashed a line through the runes and something plowed through his body and erupted from the palm of his hand, streaming into the sky. The lines between his staples burned and his skin peeled back. He yelled senselessly into the feeling, eyes snapping shut; the only thing he could really feel was Hanna's cold hand around his wrist, keeping him in his body, keeping him on the ground.

Deep inside his chest, something growled, growing louder and louder until he couldn't hear anything else.

When Hanna let go, the heat disappeared, his eyes opened, and the moon wasn't there anymore. The entire sky was black, and the next sound he heard was a piercing howl, almost piteous in pitch. It erupted all over the concert hall, echoed by nearly every werewolf, and the partners gripped each other tightly as the burnt air around them was filled with the slam of retreating paws.

Soon the theater was saturated with an eerie silence. The Detective stayed on his feet for as long as he could, which wasn't long at all. Legs quaking then giving out, he slumped onto his hands and knees, head spinning. He tried to ease the hot excited clench in his chest, underneath his scar, and above him, Hanna's hands pushed over his back and knotted into his collar again, dead skin cool and dry on his sweating neck.

"Are you alright? That werewolf didn't get you, did it?"

The Detective bent down, breath leaving him in sporadic bursts, and pushed the sleeve of his black shirt up. He winced, unable to tell the difference between coldness and wetness with his fingers still prickling madly, then almost fell flat to the floor of the stage: his arm was pockmarked pink in two harsh lines, and he would have bruises, but it didn't break the skin. He wasn't going to be a werewolf.

"Oh man, that was way too close," Hanna groaned. The Detective nodded tiredly, swallowing against the uncomfortable burn in his chest. Trying to chase himself out of his brainstem, he turned to his partner, about to ask what the spell was that blocked out the moon, but Hanna was looking beyond him, face blank with shock.

"Seriously?" the small zombie fairly whimpered, hands limp at his sides.

Before he could say anything, Hanna gripped his unbitten arm and told him to check the rest of the band-members, then rushed over to the back of the stage, where the black curtains had been ripped down in the chaos and now pooled like tar on the wood. The Detective saw him crouch down and did as he was asked, running a brief examination on all of the remaining Moonlighters. All were alive and, as far as he could see, unbitten. The rest of the stadium was cavernously empty and he could hear sirens winding up in the distance, which made him a little less inclined to check under each of the hundreds of seats.

That done, he ran over to join the small zombie, who was crouching beside a bundle of technical equipment. The older man drew even with his partner, squinted into the darkness and then took a step back, almond eyes going wide.

Hanna was wringing his hands and muttering _ohgodohgodohgod_ very softly, staring in horror at the body of Toni Ipres, black and blue skirt torn to shreds and her black hair matted with blood. Her pretty eyes were rolled back in her head and three awful gashes stood out on her thigh, torn through her leggings. As they watched, she breathed in and moaned with agonizing slowness, fingers twitching

"Oh crap she's alive," Hanna blurted out. His partner stared at him.

"It's bad that she's _alive_?"

"Well, uh, it would be … easier in some respects even though that's a totally morbid thought and I kinda hate myself for it," Hanna swallowed heavily and pointed to her exposed leg. "Look."

Four messy, red-ringed puncture-marks stood out against her dark skin, dribbling blood. She'd been bitten. The Detective saw: if she lived, she would live as a werewolf.

"We can't let the cops take her!" Hanna said hysterically as the pop-star shifted to the side and moaned again, hoarsely. "She's gonna transform for the first time and go feral, she'll rip everyone apart and anyone she doesn't kill will be cursed, too!"

The Detective had already dropped to his knees but found himself incapable of doing anything more, brought to a total stop by the zombie's words.

This went beyond their little world of spooks and spirits. Hanna was talking about kidnapping a girl. They had done illegal things before, yes, but there was the kind of _illegal_ that was put in place to keep other people safe, and Toni Ipres definitely looked like she needed medical attention or else things could go very badly. Instead of going to the doctor, she would go with them?

"Are you sure?" was all he could say, his struggle roughening his voice.

"I … I think I know what to do!" Hands on Miss Ipres' arm, Hanna looked terrified, and then his round face suddenly compacted, turned almost fearsome. "No, I _know_ what to do."

Just then footsteps came from their left, staccato; the Detective nearly turned and threw himself at them out of sheer instinct, but the familiar gleam of boots and dress blues froze him on his knees. Two security officers ran across the stage, one of them peeling off to check the splayed body of the drummer. The other beelined straight for them, face pale but fierce.

"We'll take her. Step away from the body," he ordered, dropping to his knees.

"She's not a body!" Hanna protested, lurching forward to cover her torso with his own. He stared up at the officer, face earnest. "And you don't know how cranky she's gonna be when she wakes up."

"What do you think you're doing, kid?" the officer snapped, a young recruit clearly pushed to the end of his limits. He tried to shove the small zombie away, red creeping up his face as Hanna's hands clamped down into the pop-star's jacket. "Let go of Miss Ipres imme —"

"_No_."

The Detective hardly realized it was him who had spoken until the officer turned toward him, expression incredulous.

But the single syllable, _no_, was like a breaking blow to a vessel and the longer the man stared at him, the more emotion seeped from his face. Watching it, the Detective felt tense, jittery. Maybe it was all the adrenaline, but he felt _powerful_, like he was radiating heat from his center-most of parts. A dark, deep heat.

He locked eyes with the officer like it was the most important thing in the universe (the most important thing was getting him to leave as quickly and quietly as possible) and stared, drilling inwards. His voice was deep, almost sourceless. He reached down into himself, into the cavern just underneath his scar, and pulled the feeling up slowly.

"You aren't needed here. There are others who are injured. We have Miss Ipres. Go."

The officer looked at him, blinked once, then rose to his feet with little more than a single stagger and ran off into the fog-occluded remnants of the stage.

"Holy — you just Jedi mind-tricked him! Wow!" Hanna exclaimed after a beat, thrilled voice echoing strangely in the sour silence left by the officer. "I didn't know you could do that, Oscar!"

"I … didn't either," the Detective said faintly, something catching in his throat. The remnants of the _feeling_ had cooled and stuck to the sides of his ribs, leaving him uncomfortable and disoriented in a way he couldn't understand. Then Toni Ipres coughed and he was grounded again, some sort of long-gone training, hard as nails, taking over. He took the black stage curtain and wrapped it around her, working his arms underneath her knees and back and lifting her up against his chest.

He looked over. Hanna was at his side, looking upwards like he didn't quite understand. Unable to face that expression, his partner nodded towards the back and, shoe after sock, started walking.

"Come on. Let's get her back to the car."

* * *

Back at the apartment, the Detective smuggled the girl's body into the back entrance and the sick feeling in his stomach only grew when Hanna burst through their front door and immediately ran to the far closet and flung it open. Swallowing against the dryness in his throat, he tucked the pop-star among his clothes and, as per Hanna's orders, shut her in and locked the door. That done, he slumped against the door and stared unseeingly at his dark apartment, quickly joined by his partner, who he wasn't comforted to see had eyes as wide, if not wider, than his.

"Are you _certain_ this is the correct thing to do?" he asked, anxiety nearly wringing him dry.

"Not sure, but pretty soon we'll find out!" Hanna hissed back, plastering himself flat to the door. The Detective couldn't even curse; his frustration and mounting helplessness was too strong. On tenterhooks, the pair waited against the door for no less than five minutes before they heard the heavy rustle of clothing behind them, followed with a cough and a raspy noise. He looked at Hanna, who put a finger to his lips, looking as terrified as he felt.

The Detective shut his eyes hard enough to hurt when he heard her whimper, her hands sliding haltingly against the door and searching for a way out. When she found the handle with surprising quickness and rattled it, his partner struggled to his knees and put his ear to the door.

"Miss Ipres? Hi, are you awake?" Hanna called out in an exaggerated whisper, knocking a faintly green knuckle against the wood. There was a decidedly stunned shift of clothing, then a voice.

"Who are you?" the girl rasped, voice patchy. "Where … god, where am I?"

"We should probably, er, save the introductions for later, okay? But you're really in a safe place, so I wouldn't worry —"

Hanna clammed up when there came a sudden scramble and a smack inside the closet, followed by several panicked breaths and a wavering, high-pitched moan.

"Uh, Miss Ipres?"

"Please, please let me out. Oh god, please I — I need a doctor."

She was crying, voice going high and scared in that way that made any man's chest tighten, especially those who had ever dreamed of being a father. Her fingers scraped against the door again, pushing in time with her faint sobs.

"I'm bleeding r-really badly, please. Please let me out!"

"I'm really sorry, Miss Ipres, ma'am, but — you see, I'm a fan, I'd never do this to you, but …" Hanna bit his knuckles and cringed, brushing his free hand against the door like it was her shoulder or forehead. "Something really scary is going to happen here in a few minutes and you need to be away from people, okay? Okay, Miss Ipres?"

She pleaded with them for a few more minutes, pleas getting increasingly incomprehensible as she choked on her own panic. With a sharp sob, her pawing at the door slowed, then her hand slid off the door for the last time. The Detective could hear her breathing, until that stopped as well. The entire apartment was suddenly dead silent.

"Is she dead?" Hanna whispered after a moment, terrified.

He got his answer immediately as something slammed against the door, shaking it on its hinges, and both of them jumped. Hanna immediately crammed his hands over his ears.

"Here it comes," he grit out, voice thick with dread.

There was a wail from inside the closet. It started slow, like she was crying, except it tightened into a sudden, raw scream and then there was a clatter, like she had groped for something or stumbled inside the dark cage.

"Let me out! Let me out, oh — oh god, please — something is —"

She screamed at them, pleaded with them, but the words came less and less frequently as the transformation began in earnest, her feminine screams warping into tortured snarls and rippling grinding noises. Next came the snuffling and ever-more brutal assaults on the flimsy door, which Hanna quickly, hands shaking, reinforced with a sealing rune. They heard the slithering noise of rough fur whipping against cheap wallpaper. Underneath it all, they heard cracking noises like celery snapped in half under a blanket, muffled but sharp. More screams.

Every pained noise bottling up in his abused chest, the Detective ached to ask if there was anything they could do to help her – but from the look on Hanna's face, if there was anything, he would have already done it a million years ago.

"They say the first time a werewolf transforms, every bone is broken," Hanna whispered at length, then looked over at the Detective, blue eyes piteously bright. His hands were knotted in front of his chest, expression drawn. "I couldn't save her."

"You couldn't help her from getting bitten," his partner said breathlessly. He swallowed against the lump in his throat and nodded firmly. He could hardly feel his legs. "But you did save her. And a lot of other people."

"You think she'll name an album after me or something?" Hanna whispered, then closed his eyes and moaned soundlessly when his idol slammed into the door again, snarling and screaming.

"Let's leave this one out when we write our yellow-page ad," the Detective said faintly, pushing his weight against the trembling wood out of instinct alone and praying, if just to keep his mind off of the real danger, that at least a few of his button-downs survived this mess. Hanna nodded fervently, snatching up his favorite Moonlighter's album – the one he was going to get signed – and clutching it to his chest to wait for morning.

"Definitely."


	31. Rinse Lather Repeat

A/N: Obviously I don't know if the listed concoction would work, but eh. You find out weird things when you're McGuyvering and let's pretend Cas layers it with a spell. Otherwise maaaaaan I love this thing so hard. Now it's up to my brosephine Rae to do the job right :)

I swear these two have plot later. I swear. I'm not just … dragging them through the mud for no reason. But you have to admit: the life of a hunter? Tough shit, dude.

Two chapters this week for being so awesome! Who? YOU. Thank you so much for the kind words, you guys, you absolutely had me in a dither: I'd been looking forward to the concert chapter possibly since my birth. So the fact you liked it was awesome to hear!

_Warnings: language, hair salon teims, sadness WHY ALWAYS THE CASFINAS SADNESS, mentioned violence, an absurdly close look at Cas' anatomy, absolutely no plot woo but he'll be back next chapter AND HOW._

* * *

Rinse Lather Repeat

* * *

Flipping on the lamp, Finas sat back on their deflated couch and flipped through his book until he found his place, settling into the thick stacks of text. It had been a quiet night in the apartment. From sunset, Cas proved sluggish and unwilling to face the below-freezing temperatures, spending a record amount of time rooting in his bed and grumbling and sighing as loudly as he could. Finas, as usual, was content with whatever option was left. He took the opportunity to unobtrusively clean house-slash-guns and catch up on his reading.

After his partner finally parted himself from his bed (albeit with trailing sheets and a borderline glorious rooster bed-head), he even made some tea, but Cas had always been one for the high-cost, high-effect path, and whiskey worked far faster than tea for cold bones. And it was, technically, after five-o-clock.

Currently, Cas was bent over the bathroom sink, having a squinting contest with his reflection. He picked through his orange hair with an irritated expression, leggy form cramped into the dingy, tiny bathroom like a daddy long-legs caught in a too-small jar. The scummy mirror completed the illusion. A tattered towel was already looped over his bare shoulders.

For a moment, Finas considered his partner. Cas' form was slight and dark and mean, muscles packed close to his ribs and split with all lengths and thicknesses of pinkish-gray scars. His pants hung impossibly low on his dryer-rack hips, ending in two emaciated straws of fabric for legs. No matter how much he worked out or how much he ate – and he indulged in both to an unhealthy extent – Cas was doomed to a scrappy, undernourished appearance.

Underneath the sink was the stool Cas always dragged in for dying his hair but never used, preferring to destroy his knees just that much faster by kneeling on the tile to execute his beauty maintenance. He seemed on his way to such a goal, but the whiskey was interfering. After a few minutes of watching Cas try and do three things at once, tongue out, Finas sighed and, surrendering, put down his book. He strode to the bathroom, pushing his thermal up his thick arms and getting a head start on his disapproving expression.

Watching his partner's approaching reflection over his shoulder, Cas squinted uncomprehendingly at the scummy mirror until Finas took the boy's shoulders and pushed him down on the stool without a word, reaching for a comb.

"Hey!" Cas hit hard, grabbing onto the sink and narrowing his eyes resentfully. "I can do it myself."

"You're drunk," Finas said calmly, tugging the towel straight in a way that said there would be no argument — or, in a close-quarters fistfight, he would most certainly win. Cas seemed to know that, or at least was sober enough to recognize his partner's 'business face.'

"An' wouldn't you love it if I spilled the stuff all over my head," Cas mumbled, head bowed.

Finas made an amused noise as if to say he hadn't dreamt of it _quite_ every night but he wouldn't object to it happening immediately and often. An arch of his brow suggested that a 'cow spot' look might even be an improvement. After only one aggrieved look, Cas huffed and sagged forward, letting him have his way. Finas, businesslike, plucked up the dye bottle out of arms' reach.

It was unexpectedly soothing, taking over the job as his best friend sat in silence, hunched under the noxious blue halogen humming above the bathroom mirror.

Cas had already diluted the peroxide – lord knew how long he had been doing this, probably since he was old enough to shoplift – with the lotion. Finas wet his hair with handfuls of warm water. The lion-colored portion slopped over Cas' face but before the younger hunter could protest, his thick, sure fingers were carding through it, conscientiously separating the strange decorative fringe that Cas always kept dark. It didn't look it, but his hair was so dark the only way it reacted to peroxide and lemon juice was to turn orange.

How Cas had figured this out was anybody's guess, but it was to his liking. His partner was exceptionally conscious of his appearance, vanity joining arrogance and foolhardiness to form an endearing posse of traits; Finas was fairly certain 'roots' were ranked only second to vampires in what Cas simply couldn't abide. Cas had been negligent to let himself get to the generous centimeter of chocolate brown that sat below the dyed portion.

Then again, they had been busy.

Finas shook up the lotion bottle and looked at it a moment before squeezing a fair amount onto his partner's hair and working it in. He had seen Cas do it many times and had only been called in once or twice to assist, but he was also very skilled at assembling a necessary procedure from given fragments. Both of them helped one another in small tasks like this. Occasionally, Cas managed to not mutilate his hair with scissors, though he was regularly told that an idiot could cut his 'frumpy bowl-cut', and Finas was usually available for any necessary trims.

The older hunter swirled the slick mixture through the orange swath, herding it away from the brown and rubbing it in with his fingers. Working it in at the roots. Slowly, Cas' craggy shoulders drifted downwards. A brief glance in the mirror showed closed eyes. Chest filling, Finas slowed down, cutting his efficiency in favor of slow swooping rubs at the young man's scalp, folding the hair one way then another then applying more of the stuff. Taking care.

"Ouch!" Cas hissed suddenly, back jolting. Craning over, Finas realized some of the stuff had dripped down his forehead and near his eye. His good eye.

A small, chastising huff from Finas was all that was needed: overreaction, the noise said. His eyes had been closed. Wiping at his face, Cas glared up at him through the white-matted strands of hair, expression surly.

"Yeah, what am I freaking out about. I've only got one left, after all. And it's nothing like a bullet-hole full of peroxide," Cas said nastily, to which Finas only cocked his head to get a better angle, working the material into his hair.

"My hand slipped," he said, blasé.

"It was my fucking leg."

"And my punishment was paying for the damage to the shower."

"You're cold, man."

"I'm British," was his tepid response, which was enough to make Cas snort and smile.

Maybe it was the angle or the liquor, but his smile was softer and lamer than usual. It was a boyish expression Finas didn't get to see very often, and if one could pick favorite expressions on the people one saw most, that smile would be very highly ranked. Like some final wall had been lowered, Cas breathed out and slumped forward all the way, leaning on the sink. It put his dark, mean back in sharp relief, halogen spilling over it and the overlapping collage of scars.

Finas didn't know how he felt that he hadn't been there for most of them, but could name every one he had been there for.

A lumpy, starry deformation just behind the jut of his hipbone, pale and eternally puckered: the time Cas had been thrown into the wrong half of a junkyard car and a curl of torn metal nearly punctured his kidney.

Three bullet wounds. Some vampires – or other creatures – were just the right combination of cowardly and intelligent to learn that, the closer one got to a hunter, the less likely one's chance of survival was. They prepared accordingly.

Finas remembered the sound and location of each shot. Once in an alley – a surprise, Cas suddenly lurched against the brick wall with a tortured gout of steam fleeing his open mouth – once in a stand-off – it had gone so fast, Finas hardly had time to push him through a doorway – and lastly, once right before they got into the car. Plowing through the empty streets after a scrimmage, he had heard Cas' breathing condense into fitful little hisses, practically smelled the bitter adrenaline bleeding out of some vital tear in him, and looked over to find him clutching his shoulder, face pasty underneath his olive skin-tone. He yanked at the wheel and nearly cut off his side-mirror rerouting towards the hospital.

Fang marks. High on his shoulder. The scars were lumpy, bigger than they should have been: Finas' fault. He panicked, ripped the beast off of Cas, but he could do nothing else hearing the pitch of the boy's shout. Half splitting fear, half uncontrollable anger; Finas felt it too strongly in his own chest, an echo of the sound he had once made on a bedroom floor a thousand years ago. He had the monster staked before Cas' knees hit the ground.

Rippling pink-grey clawmarks over his partner's muscle-corded arm, before they learned that starving vampires out was not the smartest of ideas. A deceptively similar scar across his flank, though in a set of three, when they were reminded that vampires weren't the only things worth hunting in their city.

And then, somehow more chilling than all of them: a small, almost needle-thin scar that neatly disappeared into the niches of Casimiro's ribs, high on his side, which utterly failed to give proper credence the moment when Finas turned away from a brewing bar-fight for just an instant and heard the noise. It was the drum-like sound of a punch to the side, but with a strange _stick_ to it, and the older man turned to see Cas half-slung over a stocky man's arm as if he had run into a wall, gripping his shoulder with wide, mismatched eyes. The man's fist was frozen high on his back, some picture of deadly halted inertia that made Finas' gut drop. Then came the shuff of leather and the slide of the wide, fat blade when the drunkard jerked it out and ran.

Cas toppled as he reached for a bar stool with awful slowness and, as if in contrast, red blood spread over his t-shirt with an insane quickness – ironic, as that had been what they were fighting over. The shirt. A snarky comment, five shots of tequila and suddenly it was down to knives between two strangers. The senselessness was nearly as terrifying as the tacky warmth sticking the young man to his side as he heaved Cas, who was choking quietly and rattling, to the car. Worst of all, at the end of the night, Finas didn't know what to do about it all except _continue_.

Looking at all those mutilations and then more, a ghost of Finas' anxiety rose, imprinted on him as soundly and meticulously as Cas' battle scars.

He had his own scars, of course; his own moments of having his head pushed down as Cas, cursing weakly or fiercely or shaking in complete silence, tried to get his clumsy pain-numbed body into the passenger's seat. But for Finas, his partner's scars were like a map of each and every experience, perversely intimate and knowledgeable. The dips, the rises, the waxy textures, always followed by the long-overdue narrowing down to a single scratch of pink. The width that marked the point when Cas' heartbeat held steady. There was some twisted algorithm here: the wider the scar, the longer the trip to the emergency room. Finas looked at the awful lacerations but didn't touch, keeping his fingers shifting in his partner's hair.

The older hunter glanced down at his watch, shook his lightly-furred wrist to set it straight, then rubbed for three more minutes before tapping the back of his partner's head in warning, other hand spread bracingly over his shoulder. He pushed Cas' head down into the sink and followed the warm water over his skull with passes of his hand, pressing the lotion out. It was a practiced motion, natural and firm, requiring all of his arm and some of his shoulder. Finas' pale eyes went elsewhere, locked on the braid of the running water and the sound of it splashing against hair. The feeling of cooling fingers swiping through soft strands.

Shoulders rising, he smeared and petted and washed himself deeper into that quiet place until he expected Millie to come in and remind him to use the no-tears shampoo.

He saw the pale green of their bathroom, toothbrushes lopsided but mirror spotless, and remembered the condensed yarn of the worn rug underneath his knees. He could still feel her little shoulders under his hand. His big palm spanned her back, making him feel as though he could twist his fingers and re-furl her like a flower into a bud.

So small. Trusting through instinct. He knew he had to reward that instinct, or nothing good would come of him.

The care with which he led her tiny head under the bath faucet, seeing the metal protrusion as a weapon for the first time, almost took his breath away; he knew in that instant he would see the world like that until she was bigger and then afterward, when previously innocuous things glinted sinister in the light of fatherhood.

She complained, older, when he poured water over her head from cups. It took longer than the faucet. She wanted to be done with her bath. Only she could ever make him laugh with a single statement or the sheer imperiousness of her tone.

Millie heard his deep, rich laugh, rare enough to be dubbed endangered, and her thin mouth quirked to the side as if she couldn't quite understand it – and part and parcel his own wonder lay in his lack of understanding. He simply felt, because she gave him no chance at his so-esteemed cognition before overwhelming him with everything she was. She was so infinite, so godly yet so tiny, he so besmitten and awestruck, he could see her fallen eyelash and think it genius and unique.

Now, in another life, his hands smoothed over naked dark skin and a mutilated body, something denied safety and dragged through harshness, but there was a tenderness there, in the seam of his pale hand and Cas' skin, that couldn't be misnamed. Couldn't be misunderstood or underestimated. Standing over the back that had been destroyed and threatened so many times, a buried part of Finas wanted to twist his hand and compact Cas, fold his thin limbs in and make him a smaller target.

Hide him so that, when his time came, they wouldn't know where to find him. Keep him there. Keep him safe.

It made him think of Cas' parents, and how they had doubtlessly loved him with the same near-nauseating intensity – and how they were lucky to be where they were. Their vision would need no skewing. There were too many weapons and threats in the young man's life to stoop to fabricating them. No parent should see what he saw on Cas' back daily, much less the deeper gap that hid in his chest: the one he had carved out in himself for Finas' sake.

Now, he saw that the year-long distance between them was perhaps due to anger as much as the difficulty he had in forgiving himself.

When the last of the slipperiness was gone from his hair – Cas had been under the faucet for far too long but said nothing – Finas raised him up, around the faucet, and squeezed the majority of the water away. Then he inspected his job. The roots of Cas' hair were a dirty orange, not as pure as the ends of the abused and re-dyed mane but passing. He doubted vampires looked too closely anyways.

He had accomplished his job. He looked up to find Cas' mismatched eyes pinned on him in the mirror, an unnameable expression on his young face. The older man swallowed and stared back, gaze eventually drifting to the reflection of his work.

"You should dye your goatee," Finas suggested just to speak, mechanically flipping his hair over into a ridiculous Mohawk and staring fathomlessly into the mirror. Dead serious, as the saying went. "Or perhaps just one eyebrow. Or half of one eyebrow."

"Okay, okay, you've done enough damage," Cas groused at him, slapping his hands away and rising. Skin hunched into a rich brown ripple between his shoulder blades, he attacked his head with the towel. Finas watched until the drying met his specifications (or maybe he didn't want to leave just yet, the silver blade of the faucet was still too close) and cocked his head to the side.

"What do we say?" Finas prompted him without emotion, rewarded by a scoff deep in the mess of towel.

"Thanks," Cas whined, whipping the towel off of his head and onto his shoulder so Finas could see his utterly delightful sneer. "_Dad_."

Finas' mouth twitched neither up nor down, then he turned and left. He only made it halfway through the living room, albeit with a slow stride, before Cas stumbled half out of the bathroom and spoke.

"What's, uh … what's for dinner?"

A small peace offering of a sentence; Finas knew that soft, abashed tone, another he simultaneously liked and wished he never had to hear. At least he was sobering up. Finas smiled, then, a definitive up. He thought about it. He had started rice.

His skill at cooking was mostly presumption combined with uncomfortable echoes of pushing bubbling eggs around in a pan for two big blue eyes, but as much as Casimiro whined about his lacking menus, he became quiet the instant anything traveled from a pan onto his plate. He seemed to understand what it meant, and with a preternatural conciseness at that. They couldn't subsist on purchased food, after all, and Cas' nutrition was apparently his responsibility. Left to his own devices, the floor of their car would be carpeted in fast-food wrappers.

"Chicken and rice," Finas said, rolling his sleeves back down. "And there is an extra salsa in the cabinet."

He specified 'an' because he meant the entire jar. Cas liked his food ridiculously spicy, but that sloppy, unspecified kind of spicy that found curry and Tabasco mixing juices. He almost felt the grin behind him.

"You're my man," Cas said and Finas didn't like the weakness in his voice. Not looking back, Finas walked to the small kitchen and turned on the radio.

"It will be ready in a quarter."

It was far longer than a quarter. When he scraped the pale concoction onto Cas' plate, his partner gripped his broad shoulder tightly for a full second before he sat down and, just for effect, voiced a mediocre complaint about the consistency. Finas, feeling whimsical, smacked him hard over the head with the end of the spoon. Jolting upright, Cas called him something that didn't bear repeating in any language and, chest full again, Finas laughed.

Dinners, whether at five pm or five am, were time for family.


	32. Supernatural Meet and Greet

A/N: Ooh, lookit the pretty sparkles as the plot-lines converge. Zing!

Thanks for waiting, you guys. Hope the result of all my fevered airport writing is up to snuff!

_Warnings: language, violence, disturbing imagery, hopelessly veiled dialogue, a wee bit of playful molestation, flying zombie bits, a severe lack of wit in the author's comment and oh let me show you my nerdiness with my lyric-ganking a.k.a. shameless Ludo love._

* * *

Supernatural Meet and Greet

* * *

He was in the grey again.

He only looked left and right, then stopped, knowing with a chilly certainty that there was nothing more behind him. Someone had brought him here. The very stillness of the place spoke of it. He tried to prepare as best he could and found he could do nothing but wait, hands empty at his sides.

The woman with the green eyes came to him through the mist, her body blue and walking along some continental shelf that solidified beneath them with every soundless footstep. They were somewhere deep. Somewhere sharks dreamt.

A mirroring fear, low and dark as they, gripped him, and he tried to look and prepare as he never had. She was fainter, somehow, or flickering jarringly between states of solidity and evanescence that left her energy all the sharper, all the more bitterly aware of time. She was fading, and it cost her something to move through the heavy water in front of him. There was a hyper-cyan glow about her, blurring her edges, and a dark shape around her neck that trailed off into the blue like a rope.

Though it floated like a strand of hair, he knew it held her back. Knew it hurt.

"I don't understand," he told her when he could bear her drifting advance no more, breaking the deep blue silence. He took a small step back because he knew there was nothing behind him: and that void was dangerous. "Why are you following me? I haven't done anything wrong."

The woman stopped and looked at him imperiously, her silver hair drifting regally, crown-like, around her heart-shaped face. Then, as he watched, there was a crash of expressions on her far-away porcelain features – anger, vindication, desperation, then a twisting that was almost sorrowful. She closed her eyes for a moment and the world around them darkened.

"No. You haven't."

He stared, uncomprehending, and his fear didn't lessen but actually increased to an insistent clenching sensation at the base his throat. Though he couldn't hope to puzzle through the emotions shaking the water just above his skin, for the first time he studied the face on which they were displayed: the eyes he realized were just a touch too large. He saw the fae-like perfection of her lips and nose and heard the penetrating coldness of her voice. The ring of silver behind it, hauntingly melodic.

The halo of blue light made her otherworldly, but everything else said she was not nor had ever been human.

"Please, don't. I have something I need to do," he pleaded when she began to walk again, gaze locked on him. Stranded with the ocean pressing all around, he reached for his last resort: something he had grounded himself in and believed he knew. Something he _felt_ where his empty mind failed him. "Hanna needs me."

"Hanna Falk Cross needed you before. He does not need you now."

The not-woman walked towards him in the wake of his shock and he realized he had seen those haunting green eyes somewhere, somewhere both far away and close, right before she flickered into existence inches away from his chest and seized the front of his orange shirt and ripped it open.

Jerking backwards, he tried to push her away but her white arms were corpse-stiff and his tie was torn from his neck with a perversely clear snap. His mutilated chest was bare and her eyes were hard. He didn't have time to be afraid.

He made a stifled, airless noise when her doll fingers hooked into one of the folds of his serpentine scar and pushed in with a vicious strength. His chest convulsed in a shockwave of coldness and he looked down to see his skin puckered waxily around the girth of her wrist. Then, another shove, and her arm jabbed in up to the elbow.

The most terrifying sensation was not of fingers plunging into dense sticky flesh and cracking guardian ribs, but of slithering forward through toxic emptiness. Her arm was a cruelly thin sounding rod connecting their bodies, skewering him; he convulsively gripped her small shoulders, voice finally breaking through his tight throat.

He yelled hoarsely into the expanding void as his knees buckled and his back caved, weakened by the thick, nauseating sensation of her fingers scraping at his retreating insubstantial insides.

Sharp and sudden, he felt her fingers curl. Grisly strands of himself condensed and tangled underneath her hard nails and his breath caught. His own fingers mirrored the action on her small shoulders before she ripped outwards, rending the fabric of his chest along the burning seam and sending his head snapping back, mouth open.

His legs gave out and he fell backwards, hitting hard. His back arched, something bubbling up tar-like underneath the canopy of his dripping ribs and tattered skin. He felt some bulging, some straining, that made his spine undulate like a trapped centipede.

She fell upon him and he felt her brutal determination, conducted along his torn skin like stinging electricity. She shoved him against the ground and tore something rotten out of him with all the strength in her body, ripping and ripping at the pulsing center of his struggling body until the waiting water rushed in and something darker rushed out with a rising rumble, blotting out the light – and at the first burn of deep cold, he jerked up out of the water, through the woman —

– and into his silent grey apartment.

Hands slapping against the wall, the Detective fell forward and breathed in sharply. Though he could feel his eyes wide and dry, he couldn't see for a few seconds, or couldn't comprehend the motionless stretch of the apartment hallway in front of him, ending in the crooked wooden door. His home. His bony body prickled beneath him, a thousand miles away. His throat stung.

"Antonio?"

A skinny green hand was on his arm, a staggering line of small black stitches across the wrist. World hovering just behind his tingling ears, he looked over.

To his right, bundled against the closet door and waiting for his gaze for God only knew how many hours, Hanna was an uncanny photograph from the previous night, complete with his hands molded around the CD and the same terrified expression on his round, green face. Looking, sinking back into his shell of skin and rumpled clothing, the Detective _remembered_, which might have been his worst decision of the morning. He barely resisted the urge to exhale and lean back and shut it all out again. Just looking at him, he knew the tiny zombie hadn't opened the closet door – and really didn't want to.

Hanna's partner opened his suddenly foul-tasting mouth to ask anything that would break the eerie silence when a sharp rapping noise came from the front of the tiny apartment, saving him the words.

Both of them looked over to the door, eyes wide. The entire apartment lay frozen around them, dust-motes swirling surreally in the bands of grey early-morning light. The rapping changed to a banging, brutal and insistent, and the Detective swallowed hard, praying that the girl locked in their closet wouldn't wake up. With increasing quickness, his mind translated the scene into the legal jargon he'd become so accustomed to over the past year: kidnapping, withholding medical care, mental abuse. Throat tight, responsibility sitting stone-like in his gut, he mechanically reached for the floor to push himself up, but didn't get far.

"Dude, open up!" their visitor commanded, voice muffled but clearly teenaged. He gave the door a few more kicks and what sounded like a very solid punch. "Marc Raney, Mr. Raney, or whatever! Wake up and get your ass out here. It's Veser. Veser Falun. The guy who rebooted your zombie? Let me in!"

To his right, Hanna's mouth dropped open and snapped shut in the same second, then the small zombie scrambled to his feet and toward the door. His partner remained on the floor, watching as Hanna peeked through the peep-hole and cautiously opened the door only to have it knocked open by a young man just a few inches taller than him, razorblade teeth already glinting out of a grimace.

"Jesus, took you long enough," Veser snapped, defiantly yanking his mottled grey hoodie straight and striding into the dark apartment. Tossing a bag to the floor like it was his own hallway, he was already glaring guardedly at his poor surroundings by the time the utterly flustered zombie fought his way out of the gap between the door and the wall, stumbling over his checkered vans and the discarded bag.

"Will you keep it down?" Hanna hissed, clearly trying to get over having their apartment invaded. He brushed his shirt off and maneuvered in front of the hunched sea-witch, face screwed up into something close to a pout. "Jeez, it's been like a month. What are you even doing here? How'd you find us?"

"I put a charm tracer on you, dumbass," Veser responded, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. Then he dug in his pocket and pulled out an abused roll of printer paper, which he shoved in Hanna's hand. "For everything else, there's the internet. I gotta say though, it's a wonder you get any traffic. That ad's like the micropenis of the dick world."

Perplexed and preferring not to delve into Veser's similes, the zombie unrolled the paper and looked down at it. It was a print-out of their (very poorly constructed, humble) internet ad. Hanna frowned at it, then turned back to his partner, hand out.

"I told you we should have paid for the full page!"

The Detective's mouth fell open, perhaps to instinctively defend his want of caution in that department of their lives (and their limited budget), but Veser snorted and stepped between them, expression unexpectedly serious.

"Not my problem. If I cared about the size of your ad, I would've left a review or something."

"You can leave reviews on ads?" Hanna pressed, mouth wide.

"You can deal with it later," Veser snapped too harshly, then took a deep breath. He looked between the two partners and his near-glowing green eyes settled on the Detective, radiating a stark intensity mirrored by the hard lines of his brows and mouth. "I've got a case for you guys."

"A case?" Hanna repeated, poking out from behind him. The zombie's expression was a mixture of curiosity and the faint, squirming frustration that always surfaced when everyone assumed his partner to be the head of their operation. It was a fifty-fifty chance, so why did everyone get it wrong so often?

"Yeah. My dad," Veser said, turning around in the empty hall. "He's missing."

"I thought that was your mom?" Hanna asked, a little hoarsely.

"My mom's dead. There's a difference," Veser answered flatly. Hanna made an uncomfortable noise, poking his fingers together and staring blankly at the thoroughly over-watered potted plant that was in the slow and wrenching process of dying in their hallway.

"That's, um … I'm really sorry, but that's kinda besides the point. If your dad is missing, you really have to call the police. I don't think we can help you. We're not a missing persons team —"

"Don't talk to me like I'm five! I went into my house and there was fucking _sulphur_ on my windowsill," Veser spat, jabbing his finger at the ground. "You tell me if a cop will be able to handle a demon!"

"Sulphur? Damnit," Hanna exclaimed, voice hushed, then grimaced and looked at Veser in earnest, convinced but still hesitant. He ruffled his plume of orange hair and exhaled slowly through his teeth. "We still can't go with you right now. We've sorta got … something in the closet."

"What, your boyfriend?" Veser demanded, giving a bleak smirk.

_Christ_, Hanna thought. The half-selkie recovered fast, or put up a damn good front.

"Uh. No. A … girl."

"Dude, you've got a girl tied up in the closet?" Veser said skeptically, like this could either be very fun or very, very wrong.

"Yeah, and we were sorta about to let her out and tell her that she's a werewolf now and I don't think you're the 'breaking news' type," Hanna pushed out in one breath, green arms ram-rod straight at his sides. There was a steely glint in his glowing blue eyes that spoke of Chihuahua protectiveness and the rest of his expression communicated quite well that he did not want the obnoxious half-selkie involved in this delicate procedure in any way. His partner, currently busy getting to his tingling and half-shoed feet, seconded his thoughts.

"Ow, tough shit," Veser whistled, confirming both the investigators' suspicions as to his 'sensitivity rating.' Then the sea-witch shrugged, leaning flippantly up against the peeling wall. "Well, hey, I can be your freak backup. Solidarity in supernaturality and all that junk."

Hanna just stared at him, disbelieving, and Veser crossed his arms and narrowed his highlighter-green eyes.

"Kay, how 'bout this: I'm not leaving until you find out where Lee is, so you'll have to deal with my freak backup. It's either that or I hex that fuckin' door shut and believe me, man, you do not wanna mess with my hexes."

Stifling a shudder of utter frustration, Hanna grimaced and crossed his eyes at the Detective, who dearly wanted to smile. Unfortunately, the older man couldn't do anything more than pull back and frown even more deeply as Hanna eyed the closet with trepidation and tugged at the hem of his shirt. Finally, the small zombie approached it like it was the gateway to hell and took a deep, cleansing breath before tentatively reaching out.

"M-miss Ipres?" Hanna knocked on the door with a knuckle, grinning lamely out of nerves. There was no answer. He crept closer, every inch adding to the depth of his grimace-grin. "Hello?"

"_Let me the fuck out_."

It was sudden, making Hanna jerk away from the door. Her voice was incredibly rough and vicious, nearly a snarl, leaving the Detective to wonder how long she had been awake – and how much wolf was still in her. Hanna gulped audibly and reached for the handle.

"Okay. Okay. Letting you the fuck out, right now. Right."

The zombie opened the door, scrambling back with a muted sound of dread. Out lurched a girl on all fours, shoulders hunched, a matte patchiness spread over her matted bangs that could only be attributed to dried blood. She slowly rose to her booted feet and staggered to the doorframe, knees shaking below her tattered blue skirt, and wiped the hair out of her face.

Veser's jaw dropped, displaying a multitude of pointy scary teeth.

"Dude, that's not a _girl_, that's fuckin' Toni Ipres from the Moonlighters!" he exclaimed, pointing at the bedraggled and kidnapped pop-star most unnecessarily.

"_And we would like to stay calm about this_," Hanna grit out, smacking his hand down. The two glared hotly at each other for just a moment before looking left, drawn by the sharp serial crack of heels as Toni Ipres stormed towards them, a hellish fire burning in her dark eyes. Veser, seeing her target, stumbled back, leaving the zombie defenseless and wide-eyed as the young woman closed in.

"Who the hell are you and why did you kidnap me? Tell me _right now_."

Miss Ipres grabbed Hanna by the wrist and, with impressive speed, twisted it across his front and slammed him against the nearest wall. He hit with a thump that shook the cheap mirror on its hinges, glowing blue eyes wide. Her bared teeth, while white and very even, were inches from his nose.

"I, uh. Um. _Well_."

Green limbs tangled, Hanna didn't answer his partner's concerned stare. Mostly, he appeared caught between several explanations and seemed very confused as to what he should be feeling, because Miss Ipres was still horribly angry (with him, even) but she was still _touching_ him and that was making his undead brain lock up a little. At last, he just derped out and grinned like an idiot. His head flopped puppy-like to the side, glow of his eyes turning misty.

"Man, you smell pretty, even with all that bloo – "

Riling, Miss Ipres snarled and her heel scraped against the cheap wood as she flipped Hanna around and shoved him flat to the wall and, in doing so, yanked at his arm. Something triple-snapped, loud and clear, and she was left with the majority of the zombie's arm dangling from her hand, bit of bone peeking out at the end. The two were frozen like that against the peeling wall for a perilous moment before she felt the _difference_ in weight and balance and looked down.

It was too sudden for Hanna to grimace or say anything: face blanking, Miss Ipres gave an ear-splitting shriek and stumbled backwards. She dropped the thin green limb as if it had burned her, then ran and threw herself behind the couch, still screaming shrilly enough to wake the whole apartment complex.

"No! No, I'm okay, I'm okay!" Hanna blustered, running forward to pick up his arm with his other hand. He whacked it against the remnants of his severed limb then realized he couldn't quite pop in on one-handed and just gave up with an exasperated shrug, disconnected hand flopping alarmingly. "That's what I was … going to tell you. This is … Miss Ipres, are you okay?"

"_No_. I am _not okay_," she grit out from behind the couch, the high shiver of the scream lurking behind her words. "That is the _last thing I am right now_."

"No, I think you're okay. You're just not _happy_, but you're really safe here and nothing's going to happen to you. Nothing else, at least," Hanna added, wincing. If he was expecting an answer, merry and declarative of her restored faith, he didn't receive it. The zombie shifted uncomfortably on his feet, tapping his dislocated arm against his side. "How'd you, er, sleep?"

There was an even longer silence. Helplessness growing, Hanna looked to his partner, who shrugged tensely from his vantage point beside the closet. As far as he was concerned (and in so far as he was willing to accept the consequences of such faith), Hanna was the public relations guru here, at least concerning supernatural creatures. On the other side of the hall, Veser gestured fervently to the couch and mouthed something both completely incomprehensible and probably in bad taste.

Gritting his teeth, Hanna tried again.

"You're safe, Miss Ipres. I promise. I know we kinda kidnapped you, but that was only because you were going to hurt a lot of people if we didn't. We're not going to keep you here or anything creepy or crazy. As soon as we talk to you, you can leave. … Can you at least poke your head out?"

The apartment was dead silent for a moment, draining the last of the bounce in Hanna's body and making his wiry green limbs creak with the weight of it, and then four dark fingers slid over the edge of the couch. The young woman rose up slowly until she was kneeling, her bloodshot eyes pinned on the young, one-armed zombie in the intense and uncomfortable middle-ground that stood between 'horrified gape' and 'suspicious glare'. Hanna sighed in relief, accidentally gesturing with his detached arm and not noticing how she immediately tensed up and dropped down an inch.

"Okay. Well. Now we can … uh. Hi. Welcome to the Cross and Associate building! This is our office-kitchen, that's our office-livingroom, I guess this is our, uh, office-hallway, aaand … the tour's over! We have a bathroom in the back, too, but it's not really office-y. Now I guess it's sort of a … supernatural meet and greet." The zombie chuckled uncomfortably, scuffing his shoes. "Get you, uh … acclimated."

There was no answer, so he put his hand (the one on the detached arm, again) to his chest.

"I'm Hanna Falk Cross. I'm a zombie. I was killed a while ago and I don't even know who raised me or why. That's my partner Beauford and he's an undercover police officer and a really good cook. Or at least it smells like it."

He flashed his partner a smile, as if to say _sorry I don't know for sure_, then cleared his throat and looked back to the pop-star, getting to the truly uncomfortable part.

"We're paranormal investigators. We help with ghosts and stuff, because they're totally real and they cause a lot of problems, and surprisingly a lot of them are plumbing-related. But we were, uh … at your concert earlier today — yesterday I think it is now, yeah — and the show was attacked by werewolves," he explained, striving to make it short and clean and serious. "Weird things have been going on in the city lately and we tried to stop the attack, but you were bitten and scratched and nearly, like, mauled to death. So, after a whole bunch of really hard decisions that psychos wouldn't take the time to make, we took you back to our place and locked you up in our closet so you would be safe to have your first transformation, so before you start feeling sad about being a werewolf, think, hey, I could be dead!"

The apartment was silent for a long, long moment. Both of them stared at each other, Hanna with rousing hope on his face, the pop-star with utter blankness. The Detective and Veser watched from afar, sporting varying expressions of tension.

"You're dead?" she whispered at length, dark eyes childishly wide.

"Mostly dead. Half dead," Hanna said with an uncomfortable twitch of his mouth, wondering if he should repeat everything else he said after that.

"Which half?" she said flatly, to which Hanna's face twisted up in a wince so pronounced his nose nearly touched his ear. Then she frowned, blinked, and looked over at the Detective.

"What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing," Hanna said quickly. "Well, besides the amnesia. He's, like, the straight man to my dead guy act. He does the breathing, I do the other stuff. It's pretty cool."

Grinning, Hanna waited. Their visitor-slash-captive had nothing more to ask and the apartment descended back into tense silence. Once again, knowing the pattern of stops and starts and how they wore on the brakes of the comprehension-car, Hanna sighed.

"Can you please come out from behind the couch, Miss Ipres?"

It only took one more look, regardless of how long it lasted and how much anxiety it communicated, before the pop-star rose and carefully picked her way out from behind their wrecked couch, stepping awkwardly around a stack of magazines in her heels. Before anyone could say anything, she preempted them by putting out a hand, still wrapped in her fingerless gloves. She took a deep breath, possibly the deepest she had ever taken.

"Please, just … call me Toni."

It sounded like the five words had cost her a lot.

"Okay, Toni." Hanna smiled for the first time, knowing she would be okay. "Thanks for, y'know, coming out. I know it's a lot to take in. I'm sorry about all of this, really. I know you got pretty banged up last night. Are you hurt?"

"No," Toni said faintly after a moment, seeming surprised. She looked at herself: all of the blood was dried over intact skin and the three-stripe gash in her leggings revealed yet more creamy brown thigh. She was uncut, and felt almost untouched if she didn't clearly remember splitting pain and blood. She frowned at her holey leggings and plucked at a tear. "I don't think I am."

"Werewolves are creatures of life, opposite of vampires," Hanna said helpfully, joining in on her once-over from a suitably safe distance. "They heal super-fast and injuries aren't carried across transformations unless they're ridiculously bad. You'll be back to normal in no time, if you aren't already. Physically, I mean."

Toni didn't look overjoyed by this tidbit of trivia. Instead, she looked at him like she might cry. The battle between the experiences of last night and the somehow more disturbing quiet of the morning was clear on her face, twisting her will to believe. She had ripped off a boy's arm. That boy stood in front of her, merrily informing her of things no sane person would believe. Her hands clenched and worried at the scraps of her blue and black skirt.

"Is this real?"

"Pretty much," Hanna mumbled, looking guilty.

"Ghosts are real. You're a zombie." Toni took another deep breath. Closed her eyes. "And I'm a werewolf?"

"Yeeeeeeeah." Hanna tapped his dislocated hand against his chin and winced. "Sorry."

"Hey, shape-shifting is awesome. No need to apologize."

Hanna and his music idol looked over, surprised. Veser, resplendent in holey jeans and rumpled hair, was leaning against the kitchen sink, arms crossed in a superbly planned way. He grinned at Toni Ipres, guitarist and singer for the Moonlighters.

"I'm Veser Falun. Resident love-machine."

"And …?" Toni prompted, already managing to be incredibly unimpressed despite her stacking of trauma. Raising up to the tips of his toes, Hanna smiled wider, totally assured she would be okay. The right kind of okay, too.

"I'm a shape-shifter, too." The half-selkie took a dashing stance and wiggled his eyebrows for effect.

"You are?" she asked, looking at him appraisingly. "What do you turn into, a real man?"

"Hawhaw." Veser glared at her and leaned back. "A seal. I'm a selkie. Half."

"Selkie?" she repeated disbelievingly. For just a moment, her face was devoid of any suspicion and Hanna saw how pretty she was up-close with curiosity widening her eyes and pursing her lips. "Aren't those—"

"Seal people of the northern seas and _no_ we aren't all girls," the sea-witch grit out mechanically, jaw snapping shut in annoyance. She glared at him with something bordering on instinct and the crackle of conflict between them ballooned – then abruptly popped. The distraction from the screeching, halting chug of painful revelations disappeared and left Toni dark-eyed and suspicious once again. She took a step back.

"I don't believe you," she said hollowly, then glared at Hanna so hard he flinched back. She turned it on the Detective next, whose brows only knitted further. "Why should I believe any of you? I'm … you drugged me. That episode last night, that was just a dream. This is some sort of sick Halloween party and _that_ is a costume. You captured me for ransom money and you drugged me and — "

She put her hand in front of her face to block the sight of Hanna somewhat helplessly and somewhat helpfully waggling his amputated arm for her to see.

"— and I'm probably still fighting off the effects of some kind of hallucinogen and I want to talk to my _family_ and they'll pay you what you want but I hope you realize how stupid it was to kidnap a musician because we really don't make anything after the record label gets done with us — "

"I knew you were gonna need a demonstration!"

Grinning, Veser ran to the bag he had sloughed in their doorway. It was so violently off-subject, and so victorious to boot, that Toni's mouth snapped shut. She could do nothing but stare, thoroughly unseated from her dark tangent before it could get too hysterical.

"Just watch," Hanna told her quietly, drawing close enough to pat her shoulder. All three watched as Veser energetically dug out a length of what looked like dark, heavy cloth with rippling, leathery edges. Hanna cocked his head, curious despite himself. "Is that your pelt?"

"Naw, I don't have a pelt. This is my grandma's," Veser explained, pushing all the unwanted items back into his pack with the same care they had seen in the warehouse. "Old as hell. It's like a jump-start key, makes the transformation easier but its still temporary. Took me years to get this down."

Straightening, the half-selkie shook out the old pelt and paused in the middle of the hallway for effect, passing it in front of their eyes with a matador's showmanship before throwing it over his head and back. The shrug of his thin shoulders made the dark pelt bulge, sharp fibers catching the dim light from the window and throwing it into their eyes, or so it seemed. In the blurry space between their narrowed lids, there was a twisting of the brown folds and sudden shadow; something their eyes naturally slid away from, steered by a pressure in the very fabric of their comprehension. The pile shrank too quickly to see and a strange shiver went through the air, and just like that, he had transformed.

Where Veser had stood a second ago was a small white seal stranded in a puddle of baggy clothing. Fuzzy round head poking out inquisitively, it made a mewling noise and flollopped clumsily towards them on the cheap wood floor. Toni's hands clapped to her mouth, eyes wide and mind blown.

"Oh god. Oh my god," she whispered. Her feet smacked together, as if to prevent any chance of the little animal's downy-looking flippers getting caught underneath her heels. "It's so cute."

"Him. He's so cute. Veser. The kid you were just digging into a minute ago," Hanna put in nervously over her shoulder, not wanting Toni to forget what exactly was inside that seal-skin — which, thanks to the trauma of the day, was exactly what she was doing.

The stunned pop-star went down to her knees, hands still to her mouth, and just watched as the big-eyed seal wiggled toward her. When he stopped at her feet and eked out another declarative chirping noise, baring tiny, tiny teeth, Toni gathered him onto her knees and exclaimed at the softness of his pelt. The baby seal nosed at her neck, wiping his cold snout behind her ear, and she giggled and squirmed. A few paces away, Hanna shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, frown growing something fierce; the Detective drew close enough to put a hand on his shoulder, watching the developing scene with his own brand of hesitance.

Making a seal-equivalent of a purr, it cuddled against her chest and Toni gushed, and the very next moment there was a naked boy in her lap with his face crammed between her bulging breasts.

"Whoops," Veser said evilly, grinning up at her from under the overhang of the heavy pelt with sex written all over his face.

"What the _hell_!" she shrieked, and punched him in the face. Just like that. It was short and sharp and made a pretty solid crack and Veser went sprawling, pelt sloughing off of his back and into an oil-like puddle on the floor.

"Ow! Owww, awww, fuck, are you _serious_, agghhhhh."

The naked sea-witch writhed on the ground, moaning and holding his nose. His fetal position accomplished what the pelt might have and saved Toni a little more trauma, but Hanna was first on the scene, yanking the idiotic sea-witch to his feet and _away_ from his favorite musician, expression borderline furious.

"You are seriously out of control," Hanna said sharply, slapping at the half-selkie and pushing him towards the bathroom one-handed; in the middle of the hall, his partner held his right arm with a vaguely overwhelmed expression. "She's way freaked out already, and then you had to – to _molest_ her? I can't believe you'd do that! You know who she is!"

"Dude, calm down, you aren't her number one fan!" Veser snapped back, fingers clenched around his bleeding nose, scrawny naked form hunched. "Bet the closest you've been to a pair of breasts is your freaky landlady!"

"Well — I — _um_ — well, you — _I'm older than you_," Hanna hissed, teeth grit.

"_Yeah, which means your right hand is stronger than mine_."

Rolling his eyes, Hanna grabbed up the half-selkie's clothing and shoved it at him, one-handedly marching Veser all the way into the bedroom and then the bathroom amidst a nasal chant of _okay, okay, I'm going, what the hell, where's your bro-code_.

Toni Ipres watched it all with her mouth slightly open, rage draining from her as vital befuddlement set in, weighing her into the floor. Her blank gaze drifted left and found the Detective, who gave her a strained, close-lipped smile and tucked Hanna's arm close to his side, clearing his throat. After the sound of a slammed door, the small zombie trudged back into the room, tufty red head bowed, even the white curls of hair at his temples drooping.

"I-I am, oh man, so sorry. He's just … he's totally not on our team. I mean, we don't pay him, and not because we don't have the money. Well. Not that we get paid much."

Recognizing the beginnings of a nervous rant, the zombie cut himself off with an odd choking noise and fell into timorous wordlessness, then realized that Toni wasn't screaming at him. The apartment was silent, but it was a different kind of silence from before. She was waiting. The Detective caught his eye and nodded at him, and Hanna took a deep breath.

"I'm a zombie. Veser's a selkie. We sort of know a vampire and gnomes are cool. You see, people like you are everywhere and I'm really sorry it had to happen like this, but there are worse things you could be. Being a werewolf is just a monthly thing: you can prepare yourself for it and even change at will and control your were-form. Some werewolves wouldn't be any other way! And you've got enough money to build yourself a really strong steel-reinforced room to hole up in. At least you're not a vampire. You don't even have to change your lifestyle! You can still sing," he finished dreamily, then gave a faint chuckle and scratched morosely at his curly red hair. "Just … full-moon concerts are out of the question."

After a moment, Toni sat back, putting her head down. Slowly, she gathered her folded legs under her arms, hugging them to her chest.

"This is real."

There was no question to her voice. Hanna nodded.

"I'm sorry it had to happen this way," the Detective said softly. It was the first time she heard him speak, and it was enough to make her look up, eyes wet. Toni sniffed slightly and absently pushed her hair away from her face, looking around the bare, unknown apartment as if placing herself in it for the first time. For a moment, her full lips trembled.

"I guess you're right," she said, voice small as she stared at the opposite wall and the large crack in it. "If last night really happened … You took care of me."

"If by taking care of you, you mean locking you in a small room so you wouldn't kill us, that was definitely us," Hanna said blankly, fingers tapping nervously against his leg.

"No, I mean … You were the only ones who knew how to deal with it. Anyone else would have taken me to the hospital. I remember a little bit of what happened, in your closet, I mean, and … I would have hurt people. Maybe even my band. And before, it was so terrifying. Anyone could have died." She looked up at him, the simplicity of her sad expression almost striking. "Thank you."

The last thing Hanna ever expected from this encounter was those two words, and it showed. Hanna's grin spasmed across his face so fiercely that it robbed him of the ability to speak, glee visibly condensing high in his little chest.

Seeing it and surprisingly not drawing the wrong conclusion, Toni smiled weakly and got to her feet with a few less shakes than before. A few steps eliminated the distance between them. The pop-star looked at the zombie almost curiously for a moment before leaning down and quickly kissing Hanna's cheek, right next to the line of stitches. He fairly melted, shoulders drifting up and blue eyes glowing up at her with dusky adoration.

The Detective just shook his head and smiled, watching.

"You're pretty cute for a dead boy," Toni Ipres said mildly, almost disbelievingly, flicking at the white curls at the zombie's temples. The little motion sent a veritable shockwave through Hanna to rival a field of grain under a sudden gust of wind.

"Aww, that is — what the _fuck_ man, you're getting action because you're dead!" Veser fairly shouted, barging out of the bathroom and tugging his hoodie over his head. He shoved open the bedroom door hard enough to drive the doorknob through the opposite wall, but it only bounced back with an alarming crack. "That is so fucking wrong! Chicks _dig_ the seal!"

"It's the snotty little douche-bag inside of it they have a problem with. And watch the doors, this isn't your home," Toni tossed back sharply, a hand to her hip.

Hanna gneed quietly, still checked-out from the tiny kiss. The Detective glanced at her, expression torn between impressed and dismayed. Under his almond eyes, the pop-star exhaled and paled a little, lifting a hand.

"Yeah. So. Thank you, I guess. For … helping me. I don't really know what to say. This isn't one of those situations I ever saw myself getting into, if you know what I mean," she said with a hint of wryness, wilting and rubbing at her temple. She closed her eyes. "I'd offer you a lifelong concert pass, but first I have to see if there's still a band."

In contrast to the young woman's worried hunch, Hanna lit up, bouncing as if re-reanimated.

"Yeah, no, absolutely! Your band is like your family or at least that's what I've heard or read about a million times in all the magazines I buy about you, so we'll get you back in touch with them, they're probably at the hospital. I think they're all okay and I haven't been watching the news but I think Tyler and I are, like, wanted for your abduction or something?" Hanna scratched his head, continuing hesitantly, "Which is kinda true but it was a _helpful_ kind of abduction so if you could clear that up that would be totally awesome, but I, hah, still kinda want that concert pass. A lot."

"You're cute," Toni said again, smiling warm and sweet, which took the last of the strength from Hanna's patched knees.

"Okay," Hanna breathed out, his answer to everything and anything Toni.

"I think it might be best if you call your parents first. They are probably worried," the Detective spoke up softly, holding out his cell-phone for her. She took the flimsy gadget with a smile that was a little shy — he was older than her and quite handsome and she had regained the majority of her reasoning faculties — then dialed her number. The Detective motioned her into the kitchen, where she sat back in a chair with a thick breath, frowning momentarily up at the gore clotting her hair before someone picked up on the other line.

"Mom? Mom, I'm here. It's me. Yeah. No, I'm — I ran and got lost. After the … attack."

Toni looked up at Hanna, who was standing attentively in the doorway. The zombie made the connection and shook his head fervently, waving his dislocated arm, which he had reclaimed from his partner. Toni bit her lip and hunched forward, pushing her fingers through her tacky black hair. Her voice went faint.

"I don't know. I just don't know what they were. You saw the news footage?"

"So when are we going to go check Lee's place?" Veser demanded, stalking up to the pair of investigators with a surly expression as the young woman soothed her mother in husky tones.

"First we have to take Miss Ipres back!" Hanna grit out in the _shut up she'll hear you _way, but Toni extinguished the cresting argument by ending the call with surprising quickness and standing up, face drawn.

"I … I think I still have my wallet. I'm going to catch a taxi." Toni smiled faintly, more than a little lost at the idea of going back out there and going _back_. She looked up at them, expression open. "Do you guys … should I mention you?"

"Yeah!"

"_No_."

Hanna and the Detective looked at each other and Toni and Veser looked at them, all eyes wide.

"We don't need this kind of press," the Detective said at length, putting a hand out. Toni stared at it before she realized he wanted his phone back and edged forward to drop it into his palm. He smiled waxily. "We're a bit of a … private business. A need to know basis."

"I understand. Considering your jobs, I … really understand," Toni said gravely, then looked down at her torn clothing with a stymied, overwhelmed expression. She sighed, absently patting down the shreds of her skirt. "I have to tell them something, though. I mean, I obviously survived the concert. After that, I'll just say I ran and … passed out somewhere."

"Do you do that often?" Hanna asked dreamily, one checkered van twisting shyly against the floor. Then he saw her sharply quizzical expression and sputtered, "I mean, I just — I didn't know. Not that I'm saying I know a lot about you like a creepy stalker person, because I don't. All I know is …"

His blue eyes were piteously bright and the girl seemed to sense some kind of building pressure in him, and leaned in, her own eyes a little wide. Hanna sucked in a deep breath and pushed all the words out at once, shoulders pinned to his ears.

"All I know is that if you're not totally freaked out by us kidnapping you and not being able to keep you from being a werewolf or whatever and you don't think my green skin is creepy then maybe we could meet for coffee sometime?"

"As long as we don't meet for brains," she chuckled after a moment, mostly at Hanna's instant limpness, which brought him flopping into his partner's side. She shook her head, voice serious again. "I just … really need to get back to my family. I don't think I can think about all this until I do. Do you have a business card I can have? Just in case I have any … questions about my new, er, fur coat?"

Nodding, the Detective fetched her one of their relatively new business cards and they traded a few words at the end of the hallway, gestures closely held and serious. She drew back a tiny bit and looked down when the older man touched her shoulder and then shook her hand – all of which Veser watched with a hard eye, arms crossed. Hanna hung back, staring endlessly upwards at the thought that _Toni Ipres_ wanted to meet him for _coffee_ and not _brains_, and barely managed to wave back haltingly before the pop-star and new werewolf nervously wiggled her fingers at them and slipped out the creaky front door with a singularly amazing willingness to accept the unacceptable. Something told the older man that this would not be the last time they saw Toni Ipres.

When the door shut and his partner turned back to him, exhaustion clear on his unshaven face, the zombie sighed loud and long.

"Dude, you are so pathetic," Veser said flatly behind him, wiping the last of the blood from his pug nose.

"Shut up, I think I liked her before I died!" Hanna shot back, voice high.

"Yeah, and I think she might'a liked you too – _before you died_," Veser spelled out, bashing his finger into his palm. "You're a dead man, dude, what use do you have for girls? And we're _going_ now, I'm officially hiring your asses and you're mine until you find Lee."

"Huh? Okay, yeah. Fine. We _should_ be trying to find out why fifty werewolves rushed a concert in broad moonlight last night, but let's go," Hanna muttered, hauling himself around and trudging towards the door. He already had his sharpie in his pocket from last night. Irritated to be wrenched from his pop-star victory so quickly, he stood there for a minute, tapping his foot, before turning to ask what the hold-up was. He found the half-selkie staring at him with a thoroughly freaked-out expression, needle teeth poking out above his lip.

"Dude. Your … arm."

Hanna looked down and his mouth fell open as he realized he was still holding his loose arm in his hand. It was looking kind of sad to be detached from him for so long. He winced, then looked up, eyes misty.

"Do you think Miss Ipres saw that?" he asked hesitantly, foggily.

Veser slapped his forehead. The Detective just shook his head and went to get the needle kit: he knew enough for a quick fix until they could drop by Conrad's again. Once the zombie's arm was hanging on by the barest of threads with an uncomfortable nine-and-a-half degree rotation, the trio started towards Veser's house and whatever clue they could find of Lee Falun's whereabouts.


	33. Helping Hand

A/N: WOO MAN, how about those reminders of passing time? They suck, right? Clearly 32 chapters equals a little over a month WHAT IS THIS UNSPEAKABLE DENSENESS OF STORYTELLING? Am I excused because I'm following like 10 people?

I'm really sorry for the silence, you guys! Again, I've been travelling, which has left me incapable of even responding to reviews, so I must seem like a negligent she-dick. But know I love and appreciate everything! It gives me so much inspiration to hear what you think.

And thanks again to my Beta Angel RaeHimura who keeps editing even when she's travelling, too!

_Warnings: language, angst, pissy Conrad, Veser's Funny Prejudices Where You'd Expect Him to Be Homophobic, awkward plot-thus-far summary statements, any echo-text/material ganked from the comic obbbbviously, some brief autopsy-ing oh dem scary people bits_

* * *

Helping Hand

* * *

The morgue was completely silent.

Even if it meant he could hear every click of every meticulous metal tool and every subtle fleshy noise, Conrad had never liked working to music. It was a bleeding of two separate areas of his life: work and pleasure, because he took his music very seriously and, conversely, taking toxicology samples from the gut of a dead woman was very much work. It was also the third night since he had been shot and, though his leg wasn't actually the pillar of fire and pain he had expected, he wanted to be able to hear every sound in case the source happened to be of the 'things about to kill him' cast.

In this state, at least, he needed a hell of a head start.

The coroner worked quietly and quickly, wondering what the hell had driven him to come in to work at all that afternoon – besides the madness of staying inside because something was _outside_. He fought his exhaustion to finish up quickly, because it was almost dusk and every snip of his tiny scissors brought him closer to home and farther away from a messy death in an alleyway.

But of course, such pristine silence was simply made to be broken, and some of Conrad's new friends came naturally equipped with hammers.

"Hey Conrad, don't freak out, it's us! We tried calling but your phone was — "

"_Jesusfuckme_."

There was a splitting clang of a metal instrument not dropped but thrown, and a rustle of cloth that was as short and sharp as a sucked-in breath.

To anyone in the doorway, the hyper-clean, tiled room would have seemed empty. Conrad, knees wrenched at unnatural and painful angles, clung to the autopsy table where he had fallen or staggered or thrown himself – that convulsion of body could have been anything but mostly it was _escape_ from sounds and impacts and pain and _behind you_. The pain from his leg, agonizing because the fucking _bullet hole_ ached like a red and pulsing well of nervous-system hell, spread upwards and hit the terror in his chest and the result nearly fried him in his skin.

Only the shaking of his right arm, planted long-ways on the surface of the autopsy table, kept him off of the floor, and the coroner wasn't so numb with shock that he considered slamming his bad knee into the floor to be a good thing, but he also couldn't fucking move. Not a bone, not a muscle, not anything. His heart was pounding and he could hear the buzz of the lights and his senses were so burnt he didn't know whether he smelled bleach or chloroform. A swallow shook his whole body.

It took him a minute of keeping himself there, close to the floor, breathing high and light through his nose, until he heard the tentative squeak of a shoe.

"… Connie?"

Conrad recognized the voice – or just the goddamned nickname – about the same time he realized he could still hear the tinny ringing noise from the thrown scalpel. Or maybe that was just his head.

The hunter couldn't come in. Couldn't come in without being invited. Luce said so. Conrad knew that voice. Told himself he knew it, and even then it took a few repetitions to unlock his knees.

Slowly and haltingly, Conrad forced his chest to expand and take in more air as he painfully struggled to his feet, shoulders already up to his ears. When vertical, he stood and just breathed heavily for a minute, feeling the fading prickles in his face and placing himself back in his morgue, with trusted people. Maybe the safest people.

Then, hands clawed, the coroner wheeled around on his good heel with a near-manic concentration, eyes furiously wide behind his askew glasses.

"Do. You. Ever. Knock. _Ever_?" he snarled, each word punctuated with a minute rattle of his gloved hands.

Venturing past the threshold to the morgue with his partner on his heels, Hanna just straightened and offered their resident coroner a smile both sheepish and confused, visibly stuck between two impulses. Since one of them was obviously an apology, Conrad forcibly soothed his own hackles. Heart still pounding, he exhaled a gust of air and stinging paranoia, then bent to pick up his scalpel just to fucking get on with things. He mistrustfully eyed the place where the dirty tool landed for a moment before looking back up, sour expression worsening dramatically when he caught sight of not only the Detective but a new attendee to their spooky little gentleman's club.

The scruffy teen stood to the side with his fists balled in the pockets of his ratty blue hoodie, head low, clearly not content with the role of bystander. Conrad had never seen him before, nor did he want to see him now. The night, already borderline, began its down-hill slide in earnest.

"Christ," Conrad grit out, using his sleeve to wipe his forehead and his nose and anything else that made the feeling come back into his face. "What are you doing here? Are you training an intern or something? This isn't part of a tour!"

"No, this guy is really not on our team. Like, really." Hanna glanced over at the kid as if to let him know it, then turned his glowing blue eyes back to Conrad. A strained grin spread over his face, a notch away from pleading. "His name is Veser. He's hiring us for something really important and, uh, we need your help again."

"When don't you?" Conrad sighed with overflowing misery, shoulders sagging under the weight of what he had felt coming a million miles away – perhaps when he woke up that morning.

After hobbling over far enough to throw his dirty scalpel in the sink, the coroner turned and scrutinized Veser as if dubious about his possession of the necessary funds to hire two specialists such as Hanna and the Detective. Then a sneering flash of the half-selkie's lamprey teeth made him think that the kid was as deep into the twilight zone as they, and maybe had alternate resources because of it. Brows high, Conrad crossed his arms protectively over his chest and leaned against the farthest counter, as if sheer distance would keep him from the forthcoming cluster-fuck.

"What's going on, then? And make it quick, Dr. Romero might actually be coming in tonight. I could excuse you as some kind of alcoholic hallucination, but I'd prefer not to. For fuck's sake, I should be taking damages and commission from you guys. I shouldn't even be at work right now! And if you had any idea how many times I've had to sneak into the security room, you'd be a lot less casual about coming here, because the 'delete all' button and I are becoming very good friends, so good in fact that I'm actually thinking about taking it to the next level and popping the question soon – "

Realizing that Conrad was expecting an interruption (and that his grievances really had no end) Hanna cleared his throat and looked sideways, tapping his checkered heel nervously against a row of cabinets.

"Y'see, Veser's a half-selkie sea-witch and he's the one you set us up with for the memory check-up thing so it's kinda funny that you guys are meeting now, huh? But his mom died – er, was brutally murdered by someone, kinda – about a month ago and before that she was saying some really crazy stuff to Veser about preparing for something dangerous and needing to take dire measures because of it, or something. So after she was killed, Veser's dad went to the police station for her pelt because selkie pelts are super important and magical but then it turned out that somebody stole the pelt and replaced it with a normal one so his dad thought he'd go looking for it even though the people who killed his mom and stole the pelt were clearly bad news and this week he disappeared. Then Veser met this creepy guy at a bar who bought him a drink and then asked him some really suspicious questions that he was dumb enough to answer and –"

The whole way through Hanna's rant, the half-selkie's mean face screwed up further and further, twisting around his pug-nose and driving his teeth into his bottom lip. When Hanna stopped, Veser broke rank before the zombie could draw breath again and pushed past the tall, wordless figure of the Detective. He strode up to Conrad and roughly thrust something into his hand.

It was a plastic baggy, that much Conrad felt, but it was difficult to pay attention when the unknown teenager was three inches from his face and staring at him with an urgency so stark it was almost cruel.

"This is my dad's. Is he alive?"

Conrad stared down at him, forcibly clueless and, somewhere in his mind, still trying to draw the line between him, the new kid, the mythical sea-witch/witch-doctor and maybe the man named Lamont Toucey. He wondered how the world could possibly be so fucking small – or how so much awful shit could happen to so few people.

For the first time, he felt that preternatural quiver of something bigger around them, something drawing a web of contacts and relationships tighter and lumping him in the center of a black place or bulls-eye he couldn't quite understand yet, even as he knew he – and everyone he knew – was in danger.

There was a new complaint on the tip of Conrad's tongue (he didn't like having anything shoved at him and his personal space was one of his most treasured possessions) until he lifted the bag up. Whatever snarky thing he was planning to say turned into a low, spooked noise when the gleam of the plastic baggy gave way to a wide, blunted fingernail, waxy cuticle and stiff white wrinkles atop knuckles. He jerked in place, thrusting it away then bringing it close again in the space of a second, eyes narrowed behind his thick glasses.

"Is this … a _finger_?" Conrad grit out, voice reedy. He was surely the most helpful man alive. Veser, judging from the scathing expression on his face, agreed.

"Yeah, dumb-ass. Now can you do your fucking job and tell me if my dad is dead or not?"

"Please, Conman. The guy at the bar left it for him like some kind of creepy heads-up and the stink in Veser's house could put a candle to a sulfur-mine – well, not that you'd _want_ to put a candle to a sulfur mine, I'm pretty sure that stuff is flammable – but we can't just call the police. He's really worried. Obviously."

The last part was half apologetic, half uncertain, as if Hanna had the slightest bit of trouble connecting to the particular trauma of a son.

It took the coroner a moment to process it all (particularly the reasons for _not_ calling the police immediately), but he had a doctorate's degree. Expression grim, Conrad looked anew at the pale fragment, knowing what the kid wanted – or needed. Shooting a faintly murderous but still wordless glare at the two men who reliably dragged spooky dead things onto his doorstep like a pair of demented alley-cats, the coroner limped to his table and maneuvered his examination light to eye-level. After conscientiously peeling off his gloves and snapping on new ones, he led the ring-finger out of the bag with care. Absently noting how masculine it was, with a light prickle of pale hair over the big knuckles and a breath-takingly intricate Celtic knot design tattooed in swampy green ink, Conrad turned it over in the white light while the three watched.

He inspected the cross-section of bone and drying flesh, stomach giving only a half-hearted turn. There went that annoying 'autopsying people he knew or friends of people he knew' complication again. After only a few minutes, Conrad swallowed, straightened and returned the finger to the awful plastic baggy (he was reminded of the Tupperware with the bullet, which made his leg burn anew) with the same care as before, absently rolling it up before handing it to the scowling teen.

"He was alive when this was taken." Then his voice lowered and he ducked his head, pulled from his safe profession and into messy human _consequences_ by Veser's unwavering green gaze. "I can't … say what happened after that."

"How long ago?"

"It was amputated very recently. I can't pin it to a day, but the bleeding indicates he was definitely alive."

Veser glared up at the coroner sharply, then down at the finger in his hand, as if unsure how such information could be told from such a small fragment while equally incensed that it couldn't tell him everything – or maybe he was just viciously distrusting of everything in general, lashed tightly around the stone core of his suspicions and fears. Conrad lingered in front of him for a few moments, squirming in his own skin, then diverted his gaze around the brooding teen and to a relatively safe object: Hanna and his sidekick.

"And where the ever-loving fuck have you two been?"

"Aw c'mon, Connie, it's only six. That's pretty early for –"

"I mean _last week_, and would you _stop_ calling me that, I am legitimately about to take a seam-ripper to your every limb – "

"We were actually going to ask you about that, too, except on a less angry one-arm basis 'cos I kinda had an awesome accident this morning, but hey, are you limping?"

"… Are you fucking _serious_? Did you even get my email?"

"Well, we've been sorta _busy _…" Hanna coughed, small and uncomfortable, then offered with a squirm of his shoulders: "I skimmed it?"

"How could you _possibly_ skim the words 'vampire hunter', 'almost murdered', and 'need to talk to you right now?' I am _limping_ because I was _shot_, and I was _shot_ because there is a _psychotic vampire hunter after my ass_! Do you understand my concern, Hanna? Do you understand the gratuitous caps-lock that you _skimmed_? And what the _hell_ happened to your arm?"

"It, I, uh – _y'see_ – "

"Are you alright?" the Detective's deep voice cut in, obviously not aware of the mentioned situation from the slight burr of urgency in his tone – and perhaps desiring to draw attention away from the poor make-shift sewing job on Hanna's arm that resulted after Toni Ipres ripped it off. Conrad, surprisingly quick on the draw and already elbow-deep in his 'Hanna supplies,' snatched up a roll of black twine and a needle and glared daggers over his shoulder.

"_Now_! Sort of! Just, Christ, I haven't heard from you for two fucking weeks," he snapped, limping back to push the small zombie atop the nearest empty table. He yanked Hanna's listing green arm straight and halved the Detective's uneven, drunken lines of thread with a pass of his tiny scissors, chin jutted aggressively. "That's a long time in days and nights, especially after the last time I saw you. And the one time I try to call you, you put me on hold because of a _goat_ – "

"Hey, as pookas go, that was the biggest I have _ever_ seen and the grocery lady was really freaked out about it and – yeowch, I felt that! – it was trying to make off with all of her vegetable aisle, it's gotta be hard-pressed for autumnal harvests to skim off of in this city and you gotta wonder who brought it over the pond with them but I guess it would've been pretty easy if it was a livestock boat or something —"

"Hanna, _I don't care_. What hole did you fall into? I thought you were dead!"

Gripping his needle like a tiny lance of rage, Conrad glared at Hanna, fire practically spouting from his nostrils – then his elbows fell to his sides. The very reanimated young zombie stared at him unblinkingly, green arm angled awkwardly and half-sewn in the older man's grip. Ire abruptly doused, Conrad bent close to his work and continued whip-stitching, speed and skill faltering in time with his waning anger.

"Well. You know. Deader," he muttered, looking a little ashamed. Hanna took the slip in stride with a muted sigh, giving a shrug with his free shoulder.

"There wasn't a hole or anything. We've just been up to, you know, the usual. Fighting evil demon cats in lesbian bathrooms, exorcising ghosts from cupboards, dealing with the biggest and hungriest pooka possibly ever … then I sorta turned my favorite musician into a werewolf."

The last part came out in a low mumble, followed by a long silence. A very, very long silence.

"… And I'm next. I knew it," Conrad said shortly, finishing up the last few stitches and tugging on them mechanically before snipping the thread and turning away. His expression bordered on suicidal when paired with the purplish bags beneath his eyes.

"No, no! No way, Connie! We would never let anything like that happen to you," Hanna protested, rubbing his newly-attached arm and testing the much-improved angle of it. Then he hopped off the examination table and looked up at the aggrieved coroner, expression almost sunny. "You're like our lab techie on those crime shows! Besides, with your luck, you'd definitely be a vampire — "

"Do _not_ say that, Hanna," Conrad interrupted him, swiveling to pin the zombie on the tip of his gloved finger. "I would make the single worst vampire this world has ever seen and, with my current company, the idea is not entirely impossible."

"Your current what?"

"I apologize, Conrad," the Detective put in firmly, before the zombie could say anything further. "Hanna and I have been very distracted. I will be sure to double-check our email in the future. Now, you said there's a vampire hunter after you? As … well as a vampire?"

That made him stop. Leaning on the counter, Conrad took a breath so deep it shook his chest, and his sigh was no less wracking. He put a hand to his forehead and swallowed audibly.

"Please don't make me take a step back and look at my life. Please."

"Hey, do you chicks mind cutting the gossip? The fang soap opera is cool and all, but if Hanna's got two hands again, Four-eyes says my Dad's alive and that means we've got a fucking deadline. Hurry it up, we need to get moving."

Hanna jumped and looked over, face contorting at the sight of Veser hunched atop the far counter, green eyes smoldering out from his hood, plastic baggie crumpled in his cupped hands. At an open cabinet, Conrad slapped his forehead as if remembering something, or punishing himself by letting himself get carried away by his anger – or worse, his concern. Tucking the last of the thread away, he gestured as if trying to cool a fire or stop a bus, expression strained.

"Yeah, okay, you guys _really_ have to go now. I'll explain my vampire _thing_ to you later, or you can just _read my email_, and like I said, my boss has been building up to this appearance for a few weeks. I have to blow the trumpets if he arrives before I get the hell out of here. Wait, where's the …"

Conrad turned around and instantly bristled, jabbing his finger imperiously at the teen sitting on his counter.

"You, ass off the counter! And feet off the goddamn examination table! What are you, sixteen?"

And they were in a fucking _morgue_. There were days that even Conrad didn't want to come in to work because of the unshakable fact of what his workplace was. It wasn't the arrogance, perhaps, but the sea-witch's poisonously blasé attitude that was really getting in between his teeth, so Conrad burst out:

"Where the hell is your god-given fear?"

"They're just bodies," Veser muttered as he took his sweet time slumping off of the counter, giving the laid-out corpse and its open abdominal cavity a dull look. "Here, all the stuff you have to worry about is gone. Empty fuckin' cans of carbon and nitrogen and some other shit, waiting to be sucked into the ground."

"Yeah, great, glad your dinky little high-school chemistry class is doing you so much good, now do you mind _leaving_?" Conrad irked out and turned his finger towards the door, neck red.

Hanna looked uncomfortable, and not just because of the hateful talk about bodies. The small zombie teetered on one foot, sending a glance up to his partner before drawing careful breath.

"Actually, Conrad, there's _one_ more thing we have to ask…"

"_What_," he nearly roared, looking fit to strangle the next person who asked him for so much as a paperclip.

"You a blood doll?"

The question came not from Hanna or the Detective but from Veser, who had drawn even with the coroner and was currently staring up at him with that same infuriatingly blasé look, teeth hooked crocodile-like over his lip. Conrad stared at him blankly for a second, then fairly jumped and, with a worrying immediacy, yanked the edge of his turtleneck higher over his neck, color filling his face.

"I, _what_? Why would you – _no_. Why would you s-say that?"

"It's math, dude – somethin' else you learn in high-school. You've got a hunter after you and a metric fuck-ton of concealer on your neck. You're either a vampire or a juice-box, and I don't see any fangs on you."

"I don't even know what the fuck a blood doll is," Conrad said in that exact quavering tone of voice that made it clear that he had just enough information to know it was something to refute – all while rubbing at his neck and strenuously avoiding the Detective's blank stare. Veser rolled his eyes and snorted.

"Prude."

"So, Veser shouldn't go home," Hanna cut in loudly, fingers steepled in front of his chest. Once he had caught their attention, the small zombie continued slowly. "We just finished checking the place out and it's pretty much public opinion that he shouldn't even go near it at all. Judging from the smell, demons are probably involved somewhere. The guys who took his dad might be waiting for him, too. So since he doesn't have a place to stay, and he kinda needs one, me and Daedelus maaaaybe just kinda thought that since you have that big empty condo with the great couch, you could – "

"_Fuck no_."

"Absolutely not!"

The coroner and the half-selkie met eyes for a split second – even then, sparks flew – and then turned back to the small zombie in nearly identical rage.

"In no way, shape or form am I becoming some half-way house for your cases, Hanna! You can harass me here, but I am not offering my home. I already have a vampire in my closet for god's sake! _Another_ one! Alright, maybe not right now, but I think he's coming back!"

"You expect me to rot with Homo-King here while you guys do all the looking? No fucking way. I am with you every step of the way and I'm sleeping on _your_ fucking couch until we find Lee and the old bastard with the glasses! And that's _if_ I let you losers sleep! We're going!"

Shocking silence followed both of the roaring declarations, leaving the inspectors ringing at the ears. It seemed there was one thing Veser and Conrad could agree on: complete non-contact. Hanna sighed thickly and his hand slapped to his slack face.

"Well, great." The small zombie looked up at his partner and, as if they were alone, said with mournful simplicity, "That didn't go according to plan."

The Detective's face said he knew it, and did it ever, and he wasn't expecting things to get any easier. Nonetheless, he nodded, reaching up to settle his fedora.

"Thank you for your help Conrad," he said with quiet prudence, touching the brim of his hat deferentially. "I apologize again for the gap in communication. Call us if you have any more problems, and we'll try to do the same before we drop by in the future. I know it's difficult to be discreet on such short notice. Your time really is invaluable to us."

Conrad couldn't help but get a little less angry with the gorgeous man looking at him like that and saying such rational things, so to preserve his pissiness he turned around and made a hurried 'just get the fuck out' motion. The green-eyed teen just snorted again and strode past him, not a word of thanks _or_ apology. Fucking punk. Jaw grit, the coroner stayed hunched in front of his examination table until he heard the door shut.

After a minute of standing in his once-again quiet morgue, Conrad let his shoulders drop, breathed out, and stared at the tissue samples he had to finish labeling. A curious emptiness took up residence inside his chest, all too easy to feel with the cadaver's slick cavity at his elbow and the throb of his leg. It only worsened when he thought about the finger, what it meant, and what chance Veser had of actually recovering his missing father.

It was really quite terrifying that the police had no chance of helping with cases like this, where the circumstances were too extraordinary to be believed – and that left everything up to one try-hard zombie and a man in a trench-coat. For people trained to believe in expansive, trained and government-funded organizations, it was enough to destroy a whole paradigm of safety and drive you a little crazy.

Though briefly tortured with the thought he should have let the kid stay – in another universe, maybe he would've – a sideways glance at his watch made Conrad's hair stand on end. After a little scalpel business and some work with a sharpie that would have made Hanna proud, Conrad was out of the door in ten minutes, leaving results by the door for whenever Romero happened to stumble his way in. He raced the sun home behind the wheel and lurched through his complex door with his crutch right before the shadows disappeared into the blue of night, though the trip left him sweaty and shaking in the freezing foyer.

On the plus side, on the other end of an excruciatingly long staircase, give or take a sunrise, was the exact person – creature – he had been waiting for.


	34. Artist's Interpretation

A/N: Yay, art and sex and identity crisiseseses … ses!

I WANT THAT PORTRAIT ._. And I love being able to lasso in my own experiences for Conrad's characterization.

… Yep. I have vampire sex ALLLLL THE TIME.

_Warnings: language, inteeeense dirty sexual content, some really irresponsible POV switching, vampire angstings as only Worth can do them and strange bonding? Full version on Y!gal like always._

* * *

Artist's Interpretation

* * *

Luce came back that next night, on Halloween.

He was clean-shaven, which was strange. He was tired, which was also strange; the sag of his fur-crested shoulders was too loose to be sullen, and the vampire himself was perversely unobtrusive and indisposed to his usual snappy name-callings and gleeful aggravations. He spent an inordinate amount of time in the closet and seemed to have lost his appetite, at least where Conrad was concerned. He obliged the coroner with another much-needed magical vampire spit treatment of his leg, but that was it. In fact, Conrad was relatively sure nothing short of pricking his finger and shoving it into Luce's mouth would get a response, and wasn't inclined to try it out for fear that the vampire's unnerving apathy would break into something startling and violent.

But the strangest thing was not the vampire's baby-smooth face or his quietness or his willful isolation, but the fact that Luce Worth returned to Conrad's tiny condo on Hallow's Eve with a crack of balcony doors and a flare of his white coat – and stayed.

Of course, the perturbing peace wasn't long lasting. Given a few nights, Luce's obnoxiousness rose to acceptable – nay, _healthy_ – levels, and sometimes Conrad, perhaps masochistically craving some kind of proof that the vampire was really there, bit into it. Like that time he went on an errand an hour or two before sunset and ordered Luce, stumbling out of the closet and barely awake, to 'make himself useful and cook dinner or something.' He came home to find a pile of ice-cold canned peas and refried beans on a plate by the microwave, topped with what looked like nutmeg and a little sign that said _eat up faggot_. Which he really supposed he deserved. At least a little.

Still, having Luce half-live with him was as interesting as it was unexpected and not at all boring – and surprisingly, they hadn't killed one another yet.

Conrad's new daytime habits (the ones that had some interns and secretaries staring like they had finally sighted the mortuary Santa Claus that left them gifts of dissected bodies every morning) were perhaps the thing that allowed such cohabitation, but they still had the grey hours where the two of them overlapped. Despite his space issues, the coroner didn't even feel like he was edging around the vampire. He did, however, feel a singularly anxious stillness creeping up his frame when he was on the couch watching TV late at night, unable to sleep after the brutal rearrangement of his working schedule (and the attempt on his life), and a restless Luce wandered by and stopped mid-step.

It was the same breathless, awkward nervousness he had felt in that rank hormone-soup that was middle school, always while thrusting something at an oblivious crush and pinning his very existence on the chance said crush would be impressed. When Luce stopped behind him, everything about his small, lame little life was suddenly under scrutiny, including his taste in television. Conrad stared unseeingly at the show, CSI or Mythbusters or some nature special, and found himself incapable of moving until the vampire maybe leaned forward onto the back of the couch or somehow committed to staying for a little.

That simple movement – that cool and quiet presence behind him – created a small and wordless moment between them where Conrad's toes finally uncurled and he settled in, almost smiling in the milky glow of the TV.

The arrangement just worked, strangely, even if Luce was obviously highly averse to staying cooped up – or just hated the fact that there was something _out there_ that kept him from leaving. The vampire's presence didn't negate quiet moments alone, either, even if they usually happened when Luce was in another room, or when Conrad's undead house-guest was just about to sneak up on him. Like right then.

"S'actually passable, twit. Kinda looks like me."

Conrad _gah_ed and cringed into his desk, ice shooting up his spine as realized that the cigarette-rough voice in his ear had a source and, even worse, a cause: Luce had been bending over his shoulder, silent as fuck, watching him draw.

The condescending look on the vampire's now-scruffy face non-withstanding, Conrad _hated_ ducking from people trying to look at his art. It reminded him too much of when he was young and shy and shoving pens around on paper with the purest of motives and his mother kept insisting on seeing his drawings, only to sigh in that burdened way and walk away with a poisonously neutral word like _nice_ or _alright_, like she hoped he didn't continue to follow such a troubling path. The coroner defiantly shoved his glasses up and folded his arms over the sketch of the reclining man he'd been halfheartedly rendering, expression masterfully surly, pen still angled between his fingers.

What, did Luce think just because he drew him once, he drew him all the time? Arrogant bastard. Arrogant _undead_ bastard.

"It isn't you," Conrad insisted, then Luce made a _yeah, right_ noise and, looking, the coroner realized that the sharp bridge of the nose and the drag of the eyes were more than a little stupidly familiar.

Conrad sighed, hating how bits of the idiot vampire seemed to be finding their way into everything he was drawing lately. He ripped the piece of newsprint free and folded it over despondently, packaging it up nice and crisp and resigned and orderly in its uselessness. It would look quite nice in the trash-can that way. A purpose, at last.

"Or it wasn't supposed to be you."

"Yeah. I'm a sight better lookin' n'that scribbly sap," Luce said arrogantly. The vampire amused himself with picking at something in his sharp teeth as he leaned on Conrad's chair, staying only because he knew it would extend Conrad's squirming discomfort.

Conrad snorted, then looked over his shoulder, primly plucked eyebrow popping up.

"Wait, how do you even know? Now, I mean?"

The facts had long lurked in Conrad's head, only now converging with the addition of ink and a thoughtless display of ego. After all, mirrors didn't work. He'd checked the video feed: nothing but a floating coat. Even with technological advances, Luce hadn't seen his own face for years. Decades.

A hundred years?

It wasn't like it had changed drastically when he died, besides the horrifying fangs and the eyes … but Conrad, at least, would have forgotten a little without an update. A little reminder of who he was. Or, for Luce, who he'd been.

"It's my face, idn't it?" Luce said, annoyed, but it left Conrad frowning at him. Luce made one of his dismissive _feh_ noises, like it couldn't have mattered less to him, and turned away.

Little did the coroner know, after he left for work on the morning of their drug-party, Luce had drowsed in his soft 700-thread sheets until he simply couldn't abide the glare of the curtains anymore, then sat up. The vampire had looked for an absurdly long time at the legal pad laying on the chest of drawers — the one that Conrad had doodled on before leaving. Then he got up, got his shit together and holed up in the closet, going bat to sleep through the day. When he left, he went through the front door just to avoid that one piece of paper and the slanted scribble atop it.

For Luce, though he didn't spend moonlit hours dwelling on it in a rose-garden like some sad fuckers, the idea of seeing his own face after so long was strangely uncomfortable.

He'd always functioned forwards: out of his two eyes, from his hands. Even when he was alive, he'd only used a mirror or the bottom of a scratched tin cup to guide his shaving knife, and then not all that often. Didn't mind the occasional slip with a blade. But to have the fabric of his consciousness twisted around after so long, to _look back _… it transcended disconcerting and edged closer to terrifying. It was easy to forget your humanity — or at least your allegiance to human emotions — when you didn't have a face.

Somewhere, Luce heard Conrad tearing off a piece of paper.

"Stay still."

Pulled from his rare thoughts, Luce looked over, unconsciously spiting the coroner's half-heard order. Conrad, now drawn into an attentive crouch in his arm-chair, let him know it. He gave the vampire a pointedly tolerating glance over the top of the newsprint pad before sighing and starting again. Starting to draw.

Luce began to speak – to gripe, more accurately – but the coroner glared up at him.

"Just stay still!" Conrad barked, putting the prissiest of queens to shame.

Luce blinked, then, of all things, settled back against the wall with a huff. Sometimes it was just easier to give the little prick what he wanted than to face his screeching. Besides, it wasn't like he was running out of time or anything of the sort: the evening stretched out long and dull ahead of them, and a bloke could only take so much CSI.

A few feet away, Conrad scribbled and scribbled. Tension grew inexplicably in the vampire's bare shoulders no matter how hard he tried to ignore it as the human's dark, exacting eyes ground over his every angle, translating them to pen scribbles. Conrad drew and drew and drew, eyes softening as his pen-strokes did, changing from hard bone lines to fuzzy, rhythmic swerves of his wrist. The coroner reached for a tiny bottle of ink, regarded it with a little hesitation, then dipped in with a fat brush.

Some other art supplies came and went, all immediately returned to their designated dust-ringed homes along the far side of Conrad's immaculate desk. When he was done, or at least as done as that sketch would ever be, Conrad looked at Luce and his expression fell some, insecurity making his face pudgy and a little pale.

After carefully ripping it off, he held the paper towards the vampire by just a quarter of an inch.

"I'm not very good," he said faintly, by way of explanation, nervousness showing on his face as Luce's clawed hand came out and took the piece of newsprint from him. The vampire glared at him over it before turning it around – and staring.

It wasn't realistic, true. Conrad wasn't a classical artist, but he had his own style.

In the expressive mess of scribbles and shading, more icon and texture than person, what Luce saw was surliness. Hardness. A narrow face and a permanently curled lip, exposing needle-thin fangs.

There was danger in the slicing bridge of his nose and the sunkenness of his chest, both exaggerated by Conrad's penchant for hard charcoal concavities. His Guinea tee hung on him like a rag, weighed downwards by time and shading. His shoulders and elbows were used needles, flung out on the asphalt floor of the scribbled background. Conrad had even taken a sharpie and dabbed in the red of his irises, which glinted out from messy circles of ink. Luce could see the texture of his skin and face from the paper alone; it exposed the tiredness under his eyes.

Though it was the last thing he could have predicted doing, the vampire took the picture and _looked_ at it. He'd heard of some exceptionally vain vampires getting portraits done of themselves (and hell, you'd only need one) but he'd never met an artist he didn't want to punch and drag through the dirt, Conrad included. Never thought about sitting still for nights and nights and nights on end, just to reduce himself to two dimensions when he'd never liked looking in mirrors when he was alive.

Portraits, or what they exposed, had never been an option. A face — the implications and promises of a face — was something he'd left behind. To him, he might as well have had a pinkish pug nose and beady black eyes.

After so long, you started to lose track of things. Expressions. If you thought about them too hard, they disappeared completely and you were left pulling strings at random, distorting your face until your mouth trailed off near your ear and your eyes drifted apart. It was terrifying, because you didn't even know how to impersonate humanity anymore. At that point, the failing was so much deeper than the superficial infringement of the teeth and the eyes.

Luce looked at himself in ink and charcoal, hard, trying to see where fact ended and interpretation began. Mostly, he tried to discern where human ended and inhuman began, and found the line disturbingly close. He knew that, if someone had drawn him before Hanna died and before he met Conrad Achenleck, he wouldn't have looked like this. There was something different. A softness and a bristling wariness only he could see. A question in his narrowed eyes, even, like he didn't quite know what he was getting himself into this time or if it would change his face any more than it already had.

The vampire caught sight of Conrad looking at him with his breath stopped about half-way up his chest, looking anxious and somewhat lost. Luce knew: Conrad was waiting for a reaction, after seeing something stealthy and important flicker across his own solidifying myth of a face. Luce looked at the picture, looked at Conrad, then looked at the picture again.

"Eh," he said at last, tossing the picture to the side.

Conrad looked _hurt_ for the split second before he remembered to be pissed, mouth falling open.

"_Jesus_. You are such a fucking—"

Then Conrad made a surprised murfling noise, condemnation cut off by Luce's mouth, which bonked against his as suddenly and gracelessly as the rest of the vampire's skinny body.

He was just … _on him_, sudden as anything. The vampire's claws were hooked into his sweater-vest, pulling in a way that was probably really bad for the wool, but Conrad was too focused on pulling Luce closer to care. He had ten more anyways, and squirming into to a position that let two fully grown men onto a modest arm-chair (without abusing his almost-healed leg) had sucked up all of his suddenly minimal brain-power.

For a moment it was just wonderfully rushed kissing: Conrad grabbed into and groped almost uncomprehendingly at Luce's starved sides as he craned up and crushed his open mouth against the vampire's cool lips, breath quickening in between slips of tongue. He couldn't fathom the abrupt switch from scathing disinterest to sex, though Conrad could have _sworn_ he saw something complex and maybe painful on Luce's face a second beforehand.

Maybe bad art was another of the vampire's hidden aphrodisiacs, he thought blearily, fingers knotting compulsively into Luce's wife beater. Not that anything _wasn't_.

Conrad made an awkward grunting noise when Luce's needle-sharp knees dug into his sides and their tangle became a little less temporary and contortionist: the vampire finally found a place on Conrad's lap, which was moderately ridiculous because even when Luce was on his lap, there was no questioning who was in control. Just the sheer weight pushing the young human into the cushions left Conrad panting underneath him, breathless to see what the undead bastard would do next and how many role stereotypes he would break in the process.

What actually happened surprised him. Straddling the coroner's legs, Luce bent down and kissed him with every bit of mouth and fang he claimed, the smooth-ish texture of his chin almost as shocking as the hand that cupped Conrad's cheek with a strange stiffness that had nothing to do with calluses. The grip was new, uncommonly intimate, and made Conrad's brows twitch up even as he made a soft, pleased noise into Luce's cool mouth.

They stayed locked there for an unexpected minute, kissing, as Luce silently chose to see himself through Conrad, through the artist's fingers on his starved planes and angles.

Then the vampire made a short, hoarse noise and shucked his wife beater to the floor with an arch of his back. Half-clamped against the back of his chair, Conrad struggled with his taffy-like sweater-vest with a borderline pathetic lack of coordination until Luce peeled it off and made short, thankfully non-destructive work of the button-down underneath. He shoved it down the coroner's shoulders and was sucking at his collar and then his pinkening shoulders before the man could even gasp.

Conrad, not stopping to hate himself for the electrified Pavlovian lurch of his gut, tensed exquisitely for a bite but it never came, then he leaned back and arched into the soft chair as Luce's wet mouth trailed up his neck and to his ear, bringing his heart-rate so high even he could hear it in his temples.

Conrad jerked at the vampire's pants, working the fabric down his skinny hips roughly. Sudden and sweet as a blow to the head, he wanted to get Luce fucking _naked_. In between puffing at the crisp sucking sensations on his neck and Luce's thumbs grinding over his nipples, he was well on his way to succeeding, but maybe failed to take into account that fooling around in close quarters was a very different experience – and Luce's dislike for underwear had a lot more to do with his own whims than any failure to evolve with society.

In one moment, the vampire's pants were around his knees, Luce was kneeling in front of him and the very impressive proof of his arousal was literally smack in Conrad's face, making the coroner's eyes go wide in an unexpected but candid moment of shock. He looked up, like he knew he shouldn't, and found Luce's prickly mug smirking down at him like he knew he would. The undead man's red eyes glittered happily in his shadowed face, sharpened with a little challenge.

Blood racing hot, Conrad wasn't so much answering that challenge as acting on what he'd maybe wanted to do ever since Luce first ambushed him in his bathtub.

The ensuing half hour of chaos and role-reversals and shouting ended with Conrad nearly flat on his back in his armchair, his vampire housemate slumped over him. Though his pulse slowed in time with his breath and left the room quiet, Conrad couldn't stop touching Luce. Running his hands over his xylophone ribs, his dinosaur spine. Luce was covered in little dusty smears of ink: Conrad's finger-prints, dabbed lovingly and hastily and intensely all over his yellow-white skin.

Though it could be easily chocked up to post-coital numbness, when Conrad's hands drifted up from Luce's shoulders to cup his dry face, the vampire just made a soft snorting noise and nosed into him, eyes still closed. Either that or he was trying to imagine his face again, on skin or on newsprint, as the human he had somehow found himself tangled with was touching it, making the texture of his scruff real to him. Bringing him back inside his skin where he had been a looming entity with white claws for far too long, afraid to look inwards and see a dark hole in a crack in the earth.

Of course the bleeding sentimentality of it couldn't help but penetrate his haze. Too soon, Luce opened his cranberry eyes, staring down almost accusingly at the man who was cupping his cheek with his warm, soft, inky hand. But the look on Conrad's face was as intense as his was foggy, and he found himself staying quiet as the human licked his lips and ran a thumb over his jaw. The air was suddenly heavy with more than just sex.

"Do you even like me?" Conrad whispered at last, voice patchy with vulnerability that just made Luce cringe on the inside. But the cringe bled out and warmed into something uncomfortable and shifting. Thoughtful, almost. The vampire stared down at him appraisingly for a minute, then bent down pointedly, staring into Conrad's eyes, which held his with some amount of fear and, god forbid, hope.

Funny, how his insides railed equally against worsening that fear or encouraging that hope any further than he was about to.

"You'll do," Luce muttered, and pushed his lips against his chin with an awkward smooching noise. A sliding and slipping of what lips meant to humans, or cheeks or kisses. It had been a long time.

It took a second to penetrate the wall of everything the coroner _thought_ he was going to say. When it did, Conrad grinned like an idiot and _blushed_, which was the absolute fucking last straw for Luce, whose dick practically went to jello since it was already limp. Decided, he said something like _alright that's done_ and got off of him so ungracefully that the coroner exclaimed in pain and bitched at him and Luce snapped at him and told him to stop being a pussy, to which Conrad made up some other pitifully reactionary protest and, with that, all was restored to normal.

They argued all the way to the kitchen and then after. The sketch of Luce remained on the floor, where Conrad found it the next day, dated it with a shy smile, and put it into one of his favorite Georgia O'Keefe collections.

It wasn't the best, but it would do.


	35. Hubris

A/N: Auugghhh. Despite the UNHOLY LAG, may I toot my own horn when I say this chapter is cool as shit. Cool. As. Shit. I'm really proud of my ability to mirror canon while still letting this universe have its own distinct flare of events. GHHHH SO COOOOOOOL.

Kay, I'm done fapping all over you. We're close enough for that, right? Read!

And thank you SO much, FuzzyJam, for the Celtic spell! She was kind enough to adapt it for me, to which I add an interesting bit of trivia: the infamous saint who wrote this and quite a few other summoning rites often put intentional mistakes into the text so the ill-fated spell-casters "would suffer a gory end" due to a slip of the tongue or mispronunciation. Nice guy, right? All authenticity points go to her for this chapter (which I thoroughly ruin by implying that new-age spells permit fusion of latin and celtic incantations)~

PS: I've been criminally inconstant about Veser's mother's (fake) name, but it's Ieda. I think I wrote it as Iena before, but the d kept coming back and now it's just stuck between the e and the a and it won't leave because hey, it's hard to find employment as a name-letter these days.

_Warnings: violence, ACTION, irresponsible use of tenses, disturbing imagery, tragedy (no rly, tissues), fanboy Hanna and brave Hanna combo-attack, some fucking fantastic canon-twists (toot toot tooooooot), so much Plot it hurts, and some flirting that I am worryingly fond of_

* * *

Hubris

* * *

The last place the Detective expected to find himself at the end of the week, after six exhaustive and fruitless nights of searching for any trace of Lee Falun, was in a dark, old-fashioned theater tucked into the east side of town.

The place was utterly silent, as if to exaggerate the implied creak of the black and rust-spotted stage-lights dangling precariously above them. The weak yellow house lights only exaggerated the smallness of the room and the scratched-up floor and walls, all of which had fallen victim to a chalky layer of matte black paint. A few rows of flimsy-looking theater chairs were pushed towards the back of the building as if in afterthought, leaving the rest of the wooden floor peeling where others had been ripped out.

The older man stood a fair distance away from the low stage, unable to lean on it despite his exhaustion; Veser was kneeling to his left, chalk clenched in his fist like an ice-pick as he dragged it across the black floor in ever-tightening patterns. Hanna waited nearby. Judging from the stricken expression on Hanna's round face, he wasn't too comfortable with the developing scene either, but the small zombie was also watching the back door with a fervency that was fully explained when the scratched metal monster swung inwards and in stepped a girl.

Not any girl, of course, but the girl the pair of investigators had vicariously turned into a werewolf a week previous, followed by another musically talented young woman they had saved from (relatively) certain death.

Despite the fact that he had left the asking to Hanna, the Detective would never say the small zombie had a way with words – only enthusiasm. His partner possessed a near-magical ability to make anything seem oddly compelling when shouted at high volume with gratuitous amounts of arm-waving. He was surprised that Hanna's gesturing had carried over the telephone (and sidestepped the high possibility of misplaced accusations), but there Toni Ipres was, her best friend and lead singer in tow.

The Detective found it a bit surprising that he almost couldn't believe the sight when he had already witnessed a golden-eyed Pooka surge through a grocery store and knock every last carrot off the shelves. Sometimes, he mused, humans and their inherent capabilities – those of forgiveness and faith – were every bit as astonishing as the supernatural. Although, judging from the blonde's expression, he was relatively certain a bribe sufficed for all that.

The young half-selkie, a knot on the floor, jerked around at the noise. His harrowed glare was probably no more than the product of sleeplessness and the cruel grate of rising anxiety; a week was a long time to hold a finger and go without news. Hanna jumped up as if bitten and loped forwards, then screeched to a comical halt a considerable length from the newcomers when they emerged into the light.

The leggy lead singer was glaring around the sketchy theater, arms crossed defensively over her fur-lined parka and scowl forming on her thin and over-glossed lips, but in front of her, Toni stood resplendent in the bits of fog that had followed her in. She wore a black skirt with a snippet of rainbow and a trim periwinkle blouse, both upstaged by the plume of a blue Mohawk and matching blue highlights that fell over her shoulders with the curls of her black hair. She had complimented all of this with blue nails and blue lips, and the vibrant dashes of color made her skin appear indescribably warm.

The new punky look made the Detective's eyes widen considerably, as did the confident cock of the popstar's hip underneath her blue guitar. And judging from the stricken expression on Hanna's face, the sight made his dead heart beat just once. When the small zombie found his voice, he was almost assuredly more helplessly in love with her than he was before.

"Wow. _Toni_," he sighed, patched knees knocking together. "You look … different."

"I thought it was time for a change," the popstar said firmly, with a playful quirk of her mouth. Then she looked down, as if still a little surprised to find herself in one piece, or looking so different. "Nothing like a near-death experience to make you a little less afraid of color."

The half-selkie's conspicuous stare implied that Veser found the change pleasing as well, but was also eternally more focused on the push of her very round ass in her skirt. Toni shot the teen a warning glance, but the fact that Veser didn't have the breath or the patience for even one offensive word or pick-up line before he went back to scribbling on the floor said volumes. Looking at his hunched back, Toni's face fell slightly, but she was distracted by her bandmate, who jabbed her low in the back and hissed something very intolerant-sounding at her. Toni visibly stiffened and, as the two young women proceeded to engage in a fierce snit-fit, Hanna retreated to wrangle something out of his rucksack with great fervor, then ran back toward the new werewolf, blue eyes dazzlingly bright.

"Speaking of all the, heh, changes lately – "

The small zombie stopped in front of Toni, then re-realized that he had asked her to bring someone with her, and that someone's expression had long ago hit the depths of 'endlessly sour and judgmental.' Hanna ran a hand over his green and stitched-up neck in response to the lead singer's suspicious stare, ducking his curly red head and hiding the eerie glow of his eyes. The blonde's building criticisms loomed like an axe, but as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, Toni's hand whipped out.

"They're in a band. Zombies are their gimmick, they helped me out of a really bad situation, we're helping them with a trial special effects run and that's all you need to know," she said in such a flat, no-nonsense tone that Jessica clamped her pink mouth shut only with the most visible of efforts, reduced to smoldering inside her fur-lined parka, and the theater was shockingly silent once again.

Perhaps it was just to shut her friend up, but it certainly _sounded_ like a defense, and that made Hanna perk up. Buoyed and grateful, he took a deep breath, gulped and pressed on, taking a ratty red spiral notebook out from behind his back.

"I, uh, made this for you! Kind of a … how-to guide. About your new fur coat. How to… wash it and stuff. And wear it." Hanna proffered the flimsy thing with a nervous smile, gaze strictly locked on Toni. "I used one of my old journals, I hope that's okay."

Journal and instruction guide and _implication_ hanging between them, Toni stared at Hanna with a blown-away expression. She clearly didn't know how to take the kindness even as she knew it was a kindness, if just from the zombie's manic grin. After glancing back at her friend, the new werewolf took it from his green hands, a little careful not to brush them and, under Hanna's fairly sparkling eyes, thumbed through the first few pages. All were matted with graphite tangles, edges of the pages warped from water abuse.

"Thank you, Hanna," she said, tone equal parts mechanical and unsure. She flipped through the next few pages, obviously expecting a halt to the scribbles. Her eyes widened when page forty flipped by, all grey, front and back. "This must have taken you all night!"

"Oh, it's okay. I don't sleep," Hanna eked out through his wide smile, obviously rocked to the tips of his checkered toes by Toni's gratefulness. When she looked at him, perturbed (and he was reminded once again that he wasn't of the normal breathing cast of her fans), the zombie's smile dropped a notch.

"Yeah, it's weird. I'd say I miss it but I don't remember what it's like. But I would've stayed up all night anyways to make it for you!"

"Well … thank you. Really," Toni said, voice finally warming along with her almond eyes. Hanna gneed quietly and muttered something that sounded like _sure thing_ into his hand.

He looked back at his partner with a _she likes it_ look, which the older man answered with an _of course she likes it, but don't come across too strong and aren't you forgetting what we're here for? _look, which was surprisingly simple considering how much information it entailed. Toni then proved that her knack for adaptation wasn't all limited to finding herself beaten and battered and locked in a strange man's closet: she shrugged off her guitar strap, propped the instrument carefully on her boot and spoke up before Hanna could draw breath.

"So what _exactly_ did you need our help with?"

Immediately, the Detective's shoulders relaxed.

There was a readiness in Toni, a willingness to cope and move forward, that made the Detective feel particularly at ease with her. Confident in her, really – as he was learning to be with Conrad, despite the coroner's ritualistic moans and groans. They were building something, here.

It made him feel like their network was expanding, which (he wanted to believe) meant everyone could be a little bit safer and a little more well-connected in the odd night in which they had found themselves.

While the head of the Moonlighters was sent to set up the mics like a common stagehand, Hanna stepped in and explained not only the events of the past week but all of what he could of the pre-existing circumstances. Toni listened with admirable attention and tried not to show too much shock, but her pursed lips made the effort fairly obvious. The zombie, encouraged by her implied acceptance, revved up to an almost incomprehensible speed of information and enthusiastic Hanna-commentary, but his machine gun of words slowed considerably when it came to _her_ part in their covert operation in an old theater: a summoning song in a séance.

It had been an excruciatingly long week, especially for a man who had to work during daylight hours.

On Saturday night, Hanna and the Detective returned from Conrad's morgue and spent long hours investigating the Falun house with Veser. The two felt more like a forensics team than anything else, considering the attention with which they checked every surface, on the alert for any runes or hoodoo markings near doorways – any that weren't put there by Veser, that is. They turned the house upside-down searching for any other sign of violence, forced entry or magical disruption. However, despite the permeating rotten egg smell of sulfur, which Hanna insisted was an unmistakable sign of demonic visitation, there was nothing to be found.

A horrible quiet had settled into the very wallpaper of the Falun house alongside the ghastly smell. The remote was cockeyed on the den table, a magazine spread over the arm of the couch. Clean dishes sat on the counter, arranged on a towel for drying, along with a single half-full glass that had a visible layer of dust on the motionless water. The fridge was undisturbed, food beginning to sour in containers. Struck still, Veser stared into the buzzing yellow-lit alcove as if the haphazard arrangement of the Tupperware were a puzzle, maybe looking for gaps or odd angles as he tried to figure out the last time anyone had reached into it for anything – down to the hour.

Days were too terrifying an increment to consider.

Lee's small bedroom was a held breath of cologne and rumpled bed-sheets, a pale dress-shirt flung over the side of the bathtub. His bedside lamp was still on. Veser looked through it all himself and closed up afterward, locking the door with a muttered word. Then he sent them all out of the dark house and onto the sleet-wet streets. Before Hanna could point out that the sea-witch had left the lamp on in Lee's room, his partner took him by the shoulder and, with that single beacon warming their backs, they began phase two.

In the city, they met with no more success. Veser's description of the older man who had approached him at the bar was nearly a dead end. They were on the look out for an older man, thin, with half-moon glasses and patchy white and black hair, but that was all they could do: look. Aside from checking every liquor store in the surrounding area (and dropping a quick text to Lamont), they simply had no leads.

This made for three very frustrating nights, worsened by the anxiety palpably sharpening in Veser as the city's empty sidewalks sprawled outward and the probability of finding his father sunk in and he became steadily more intractable and vulgar. The sleep-deprived teen nearly began a messy fist-fight with the bartender who had served him that night, though his screaming accusations halted the moment they physically dragged him outside into the rain. After his partner managed to get hold of the half-selkie's collar, Hanna hurried out after them, shivering in the monstrous shadow of his umbrella as he watched the stifled scuffle helplessly.

Fighting the folds of the teen's baggy clothing to get a good grip on him, the Detective almost found himself shocked by Veser's bony strength – or his own weakness after three days and nights without much sleep. Jerking away, nearly slipping and crashing to his knees as thunder boomed in the grey canopy of clouds, Veser roughly shoved the older man off of him and stalked down the sidewalk without looking back, hand fisted around the plasticky lump in his pocket. The freezing rain quickly darkened his shoulders and hood to black and the splash of his footsteps were lost in the low hiss. The Detective stood and gasped white into the air until the rain suddenly ceased bouncing off his shoulders; the shadow over his head was accompanied by a mop of curly red hair at his elbow. The sound of the rain striking the umbrella seemed strangely far-away as Veser faded to a silhouette or a stain on the murky gray canvas of the city.

Passing an overwhelmed look between themselves, the two investigators could do no more than follow him, fully aware of the same clock that tortured the half-selkie but unable to feel its every gear bite into their skin.

Lost on where to proceed with Lee's disappearance, they turned to earlier events. They searched the docks where Ieda's body had been found. During daylight hours, the Detective found her file in the station database. After he ducked into the evidence room to confirm the presence of a completely ordinary seal pelt, a quick call from Conrad confirmed that she had drowned, which was unnervingly absurd for a selkie. They sat Veser down among the toppled cans of his energy drinks, stilled his jerking knee and first made him sleep.

Then, five hours later, they made him recount everything his mother had said to him before her murder.

It was difficult to find the truth past the half-selkie's scorn: the teen scoffed and gave scathing summary statements, not seeming to realize that, though his mother was the cause of Lee's disappearance, she could also be the cure. Finally, they managed to piece together that Ieda had called her son to the rocky bay waterline five times in the month before she died, an incredibly high number considering her usual fare. Each time, she gave him more magic materials, shadowed words of wisdom and alluded to the need to prepare him 'before his time came.' More so, if she failed in her task, he would have to carry on for her.

Unfortunately, she died – was murdered and laid out on the docks – before she could tell him what that task was.

His mother had always been exceptionally superstitious, in his eyes, even for a witch – he insisted that she had been solidly off her rocker ever since the selkie community exiled her for bearing the child of a human – but the one concrete act that penetrated Veser's deep-seated disregard for the she-fae was the gifting of an exceptionally powerful spell book. It was a tome he had only expected to retrieve from her at her deathbed, and even then he thought would have to take it out of her cupboards himself. It held conjuring rites, powerful hexes and deadly spells that even Veser didn't think himself capable of, which was saying something daunting.

It only followed that the Detective was more than a little concerned when the next course of action, last resort or not, would be a summoning rite, the sources of which Veser was aggressively vague about.

Other than that, they absolutely had no other option if they wanted to find Lee and the elements seemed aligned: summoning the spirits of ancestors was an old practice with selkies and their witches alike, only performed through descendants of the dead. It seemed the already perilous plan of calling Ieda's spirit was missing only one very important factor.

"_Only problem is, we need a chorus or something." _

_Hanna and his partner looked over into the living room, where Veser had been bent over a book for three hours. The half-selkie glanced at them and rubbed at his eyes, voice rough with exhaustion and information everyone should know. _

"_Song-crafting is big with selkies. They've even got a choir reserved for summonings … but we sure as hell aren't going to rope the Ag Toghairm into this, even forgetting the fact they wouldn't talk to me in the first place."_

"_Why?" _

_Detective left Hanna to do the asking; he was forcing down fuel, the way a man does when he doesn't know when he will get to eat again, or how much sleep the carbohydrates will have to stand in for. Veser pushed his own plate away and glared into the dark hallway, fingers clawed around the rim of his glass._

"_Because of the way she died. If a death is violent, you're not allowed to summon the victim. The spirit is probably too angry. But she's my mother and I don't care how pissed she gets if I rattle her coffin: if she can give me this and help me find Lee, I'll leave flowers at her grave every fucking Sunday."_

_From the look on his face, it seemed to be a much deeper promise than just a gesture._

"_We just need some sort of really good singer. And music. Don't guess you guys can play anything," Veser said hopelessly, looking over at the two investigators. "Besides, like, Tetris."_

_But Hanna's hand had stilled above his own rune book, tiny body suddenly compacted._

"_I think I have an idea," he said after a ponderous moment, voice so squeezed and face suddenly so excited that the silence that followed was, if anything, twice as uncomfortable as before._

And so it occurred that they were in an abandoned theater waiting for the lead singers of the Moonlighters to set up and help them raise the soul of a murdered woman to question her about both her death and the location of her earthly consort. Again, in more ways than one, the Detective didn't quite believe it. Still, with little enough sleep, few things could trump the older man's singular work drive, even if cognition or concern for long-term consequences were worryingly absent by the seventy-two hour mark.

As Hanna convened with Veser over the candle-and-geometry particulars of the séance, the Detective mostly just looked at the half-selkie though sleep-drawn eyes. The older man was excruciatingly tired, but it was a genuine question whether he would have gotten more rest without a teenager leading them down every alley until all hours of the morning. Much like the way he sought out night cases with near-abusive energy in the week beforehand, he was almost grateful for the chance to avoid turning in to his stale sheets and instead fill his dark hours with something worthwhile.

Even though it had been a week since his last dream – nightmare – he could feel her still.

Like a specter, the woman with the silver hair waited at the edges of his mind and his dreams. She was on every street corner, sitting in every crowded café of his dreamscape, waiting for trains or a movie or a stoplight. Or him. It was as if she were looking for a way in, almost, or repeating some action that had meaning in another life.

In a way, Veser's eyes were similar to hers. Too large. Too green. Something scratched at the back of his mind, just seconds behind his sluggishly rising nerves, as Veser drew himself deeper and deeper into his chalk circle.

"So …"

The Detective looked over, faintly surprised to see Toni Ipres to his left, deftly twisting the cord to her electric guitar. She parted her eyes from the shiny curve of it to glance up at him – very up, as she was barely taller than Hanna and that was his meter-stick for shortness – and, when his met hers, her hand hid behind her ear in a feminine motion, taking a stray strand of bright blue with it.

"I'm surprised I remember anything from last week, but I have to ask. Is it, ah, Beauford Tyler or Tyler Beauford?" she asked, glancing down and smiling. The Detective frowned into the claustrophobic hall, trying to remember the context, then did. Tyler and Beauford: the two names Hanna had managed to drop before she left their apartment.

"Neither."

There was no answer from Toni, only distant clangs and a stifled curse as the two mics were arranged.

The Detective looked down absently, then blinked to see her half-dismayed expression, edging on abashed. With the slowness deserved of someone both extremely sleep deprived and fairly unused to interacting socially, he supposed his curtness might have seemed a little out-of-turn to one who was not aware of their situation. He made a point to look down at her and smile, albeit thinly.

"I apologize, Miss Ipres. I am not any combination of Tyler or Beauford. If you want to know the truth, my name is of a similar nature to Hanna's cause of death. Something we are searching for, yet do not know the correct method to find."

"You don't have a name?" she asked, perplexed, then cocked her head when the Detective inclined his own. "What a thing to lose. So what do I call you?"

"As I tell Hanna, whatever you would like," he said simply. Then, after a moment, he put up a hand. "Just … no dog-names."

"Dog names?"

The Detective's expression became so pathetically put-upon that words weren't really necessary, but he took a small breath and supplied them anyways.

"Hanna has worked his way through Snoopy, Clifford, Lassie, Wishbone, both Scooby and Scrappy Doo, Fido, Garfield and several others. Ringo, admittedly, was in a dire situation, so I can't blame him for not thinking it out."

"I'm pretty positive Garfield is a cat." Toni snickered, then looked up at him wryly and said with a confident swing of her hip, "And what's wrong with dog names?"

"I'm glad to see you're adapting, Miss Ipres," the Detective said kindly, returning the look with a warmth of sincerity as rare as the handsome smile that accompanied it. The younger woman quickly grinned down at her boots and tucked her hair behind her ear again, curling around her guitar like a flower.

No matter how out-of-practice the Detective was with women, he knew enough about that half-cringing, sweet _reaction_ to tense up a little in a far-off part of his brain. He was surprised at how much he enjoyed the simple interaction, if just for a release from the tension and the responsibility of the previous week, but his very next thought was to put a little conscientious distance between him and Hanna's _very young_ crush. In no way did he want to hurt the zombie's feelings, especially considering his partner's current level of excitement – and the forthcoming possibility of disaster that would, of course, fall to them if anything went wrong with the spell.

The older man cleared his throat and excused himself, and Hanna quickly replaced his spot on the scuffed stage, yabbering last-minute details to Toni, like parts she shouldn't mess up on (which was surely helpful and not at all nerve-wracking) or pronunciations which would send the whole building down around their ears if she flubbed them, _haha no really._ To their luck, Toni surprised them yet again with an uncommon familiarity with Latin and a quick discussion of meter was all that it took to select a proper song to impose the spell over.

When everything was in place and the two partners had taken what had suddenly become _positions_ behind Veser and his spell-circle, the Detective's nerves returned like a hard chill.

Like many, he had never witnessed a summoning and didn't know what to expect. What merited the most anxiety, however, was the fact that Veser self-admittedly was not supposed to be doing this, which only compounded the sense of solemnity and danger aroused by the seven candles and peeling spell-book and kneeling teen at their feet.

Any sense of normality and earthly space in the blacked-out theater lasted only as long as it took for Toni to nervously rock to the tips of her toes in the silence, and, looking to Jessica, strum a chord. The first deep notes of the song vibrated the dark space and Hanna's knees knocked together. He _gneed_ into his collar, earning a dubious-yet-fond look from his partner, knowing what the others didn't. No matter the circumstances, Hanna obviously wasn't wasting an opportunity to fan-boy about (a fraction of) the Moonlighters making a private performance of his favorite song.

The song was strong and one the Detective remembered from the concert, though distorted by the popstar's rhythmic, archaic-sounding chant and her partner's wordless siren vocalizations. Instantly, the hair rose on the back of his neck: though the burr produced by the old mics could have intruded onto the reality of the spell, instead it gave the energy an audible, humming presence and another quantum wavelength to absorb into its otherworldly swell.

Like stirred pebbles, he heard Veser's raspy murmur underneath the electric melody and looked down, finding the sea-witch bent over his spellbook, his every move watched by Hanna.

"Ta metra ke'tarra'h, te metra ke ki'rah, tes metras ke fo's, de ga tes ska'ado'h o'tro me do'otro brob'osh de fysc. Hustr'oh ke'petro, i'ks de na ke'p …"

One pale hand traced the spidery language of the book, the other lighting the chalk runes in tightening circles. Veser's form quickly became little more than a dark cut-out as the magic gathered, alive and pulsing. The rite quickened and slowed like a secret breath: the rising peaks of the spell crashed against the over-arcing melody until they merged, pulled by a larger tide, and the loudness of the power struck something inside the Detective's hollow chest. Hanna felt it in the same moment and his blue eyes seemed to flare, but the twin blue will-o'-the-wisps were violently overpowered by a flash of light from the circle that filled the space under the high cieling with silvery smoke.

"— des e'smp'a mosh'da ke'hae! Et ke'petro hi'sa'khe se'mp de mai!"

The Detective didn't know whether he made a sound when he recoiled, only that he was still on his feet when the white light coalesced into a column, which held as much space and weight as a reverse black hole. Like so often with magic, he lost all track of his earthly body as the light began to flow into the form of a slender woman. Fiber-optic features emerged from the swath of white as the rite widened the portal: her eyes were shut, washed-out silver hair drifting with eerie slowness around her shoulders, delicate nose and mouth hauntingly familiar to the older man.

Muscles tensed a thousand miles away, the Detective watched with rising emotion as Veser's mother opened her too large, too green eyes and abruptly doubled over, a dark form snaking around her neck and yanking her out of the circle and into a bolt of shadow and smoke.

In a split-second, they were released from the spell. Like a breath of shockingly cold air after breaking the surface, the Detective's senses told him that Toni's voice had taken on an echoing, confident quality almost majestic in the old, cramped theater – one that was abruptly cut off when a depthless, shadowy distortion arced towards the stage and struck Toni Ipres in the chest, slamming her backwards.

She staggered, but didn't fall. At his feet, he heard Veser's rough exclamation as if through a fog. All the Detective could see was Toni doubled-over, perfectly still, face hidden by a curtain of blue and black hair. His urge to go to her was made impossible by the sheer weight of his body, so he watched blankly as the popstar straightened with a shiver of the air around her and turned a perversely serene face to the weak house lights. When she opened her eyes, they were blotted out by a bright acidic blue glow.

It happened in a matter of seconds, then time snapped back to normal with a tangible and terrifying sensation.

Toni dropped her guitar and it slammed down on the old black floorboards, making an earsplitting squeal. Jessica overturned her mic as she scrambled over to her bandmate, taking hold of Toni's shoulders with panicky strength and shaking her small form with an escalating _Toni, Toni, hon, oh Christ, talk to me, please_. Without turning, Toni raised her hand between them and flung her bandmate away with a sweep of her arm and the oily air around it. Flying through the air like a rag doll, Jessica hit an old sound tower with a hollow boom, falling into a nest of wires. At the front of the stage, Toni's pristinely blank face suddenly crinkled and twisted, anger shaping her glowing eyes and full blue mouth.

As the pressure on the stage rocketed upwards, drawn to the void around her, the possessed young women turned her head up and screamed in pure rage, hands clawed as dense, dark power daggered out of her.

"Oh no! Oh no, oh no, oh no!"

The voice, close and real and sharp, made the Detective look over. Hanna was nearly doubled in a crushing panic, hands to his curly hair. As the older man watched almost uncomprehendingly, the small zombie turned on Veser, blue eyes painfully bright.

"You didn't tell me _there had to be a medium_!"

"Shit, she's loosed the chains." Veser hissed it so softly that it almost disappeared into the dangerously rising buzz eating up the air around him. Before anybody could question, the sea-witch slammed his fist to the floor, sending sizzling herbs scattering from their bowl across the dead white chalk runes. "She's loosed the chains that bound her, dumb-ass! She wasn't supposed to _possess_ anybody, that wasn't in the spell! I don't even know how she broke out, I followed every – "

The knotted-up sea-witch stared at the scribbles underneath his hand, pushing his fingers across the rows with a stricken speed, then roared what sounded like a name and began to curse in the same language as the spell, slamming the book shut. That sound snapped the Detective out of whatever fog remained and a quick glance back at the stage validated the practice of not summoning angry spirits who weren't ready to leave the earth yet: they regularly took back what they wanted most, a body. Toni stood at the front of the stage, heaving in air and power alike as the instruments around her rattled alarmingly.

"It makes sense though, she sang the song and she's a girl. Fresh out of limbo, you'd go towards the most familiar form," Hanna murmured, then nodded with a steely look in his blue eyes. "I'll siphon her off."

"Hanna, is that safe?" his partner called to the zombie's back as the small dead boy loped across the theater and latched onto the lip of the stage with his skinny green arms.

"It's _Toni Ipres_!" he shouted as he heaved himself up, as if that explained everything.

Once more robbed of the ability to help, the zombie's partner watched intently as Hanna scrambled up and took the first few steps towards the vibrating young woman with care, then appeared to swallow and bravely strode his way into the oily distortion surrounding her, shoulders squared. The possessed young woman took no notice as Hanna drew even with her, fury-hot eyes wide and blank as her chest rose and fell with a dangerous rhythm. Reaching up, the zombie took Toni's face in both of his hands, only tightening the hold when she roused from her paralysis and tried to force him away with the flat of her hand.

The small zombie muttered something – the Detective could see his lips moving – and before Ieda's tortured spirit could surge up and use Toni's arms to fling him away, Hanna pushed one hand to her heart and both of them jerked in place. Something rippled the air between them: a river violently rerouted through Hanna's stiff arm and the link between them. After another muffled jerk of their bodies, Toni suddenly went limp, almond eyes rolling up as she peeled away from Hanna and hit the floor, but Hanna stayed frozen, oversized green hands rigidly cupped around air.

"Hanna?" the Detective grit out anxiously after no more than a moment, hand already extended towards his partner. A movement on the stage made him turn sharply on his heel, but it was Veser, who had used the distraction far more productively than he had. Expression equal parts dark and determined, the teen moved from the fallen blonde's side to Toni's, ducking under Hanna's rigid form to scoop her into his arms and stumble down the stairs with her against his chest.

"Blondie's out cold, but there's no blood. I put a charm on her to keep her down, and Fifi here's still breathing," he pushed out when he was within ear-shot, face splotchy with the effort. The half-selkie fell to his knees next to the older man with a stifled grunt, but the bang of knees on wood and the scrape of cloth was the only sound in the small theater: the eerie photograph quality of the stage continued, candles burning serenely on the floor. A feeling of dread vibrated its way up his closed throat, too similar to the feeling after he stepped into the djinn's circle; the Detective turned one eye towards Veser, who was checking Toni's pulse.

"What about Hanna?" he asked, tense and short. "Is he still in there?"

"Wait and see," Veser said grimly, easing the unconscious young woman off of his legs. "Possession is like a maze. He's probably running from her inside his own mind. My mom was a powerful as fuck sea-witch, but she's been dead for a while and that makes ghosts a little crazy and a little sloppy, so he might be able to beat her. Can't believe he'd willingly do that."

There was a ghost of amazement in his voice, as if he just then realized how insane — or dedicated, or generous, or unconditionally kind — Hanna was.

So the Detective waited. It was not his nature, and it ground painfully against both the things he wanted to do and the infuriating barrier of the unknown that had kept him from running to Hanna in the first place – a barrier that proved more and more powerfully infuriating as time went on and yet more chalk lines were drawn that he couldn't pass. He couldn't ask Veser if he could do anything more, because it was clear that this battle was Hanna's, but even knowing that, he couldn't quite get enough air. He watched and as he did so, his hands clenched at his sides, gloves squeaking, empty tin-can chest compacting as the minutes passed and pressed.

Finally, something happened. It began with a twitch of the zombie's fingers, then his arms dropped to his sides. Pressure thickened the electric air again and, sharply, Hanna's chin jerked up, blue eyes wide and devoid of iris.

His mouth fell open: the same watery blue glow emanated from his gaping throat, a frozen scream.

"Why am I …? W-what's … going on?"

Toni's hushed whisper drifted up like a weak thread of smoke; Veser spared the waking werewolf no more than a glance before gaping at the small zombie on the stage.

"Oh shit. That's not good," the sea-witch muttered to her or himself as his arm slid around her shoulders, a gesture both instinctive and protective. He looked up, locked eyes with the Detective. "She's in the pilot seat."

The Detective watched as Hanna's blank blue eyes made a slow sweep of the room, then focused on him and stopped cold. Under that stare, his skin went icy. Hanna took one step, then another, slow and ponderous as the presence filled out his limbs and gave him an unnatural weight. The zombie looked to the side and, machine-like, his arm extended and his hand clamped down on the remaining mic-stand.

Another few steps took him off the edge of the stage. He dropped and hit the theater floor on his hands and knees, then rose with the mic-stand held close to his side, like a weapon, his other hand clawed. Blazing blue gaze never parting from the older man, Hanna hefted the pole into both hands and began to stride with menacing, quickening steps toward his partner.

"Murderer," the thing inside Hanna hissed, twisting the dead boy's voice into something terrifying and hollow.

A twanging noise from the cord halted him, but only for a moment: he tightened his grip on the metal rod and snapped the trailing cord with no effort, skinny green arms tightening with a strength not their own. His mouth was warped in a grimace, radiant blue blotting out the fierce line of his bared teeth.

"I _begged_ you not to."

"Hanna?" the Detective said faintly, letting his feet carry him to the right, away from the crouched tangle of Veser and Toni. The small zombie swerved to follow him, raising the pole high and closing the distance between them at a flat run. "Hanna, listen to me. No, Hanna, please —"

Hanna screamed, high and raw, and swung the stand at him with a force that made the older man cry out. Something cracked in his forearm when he thrust it up to block the blow at the last minute, but it forced him to the ground, bones ringing painfully. He looked up to see Hanna silhouetted above him, the stand raised high above his head, rage twisting his features and narrowing his blank eyes. The Detective rolled aside at the last minute, gasping as the base of the stand slammed into the old wood and splintered the space where his head had rested a second previous.

"Ieda, I didn't kill you!" he bellowed, scrambling to the side and slipping on the coating of dust and chalk, sending candles rolling. Hanna's only reply was another sound of rage as he ripped the stand out of the floorboards and swung it again.

"I begged you not to. I told you what would happen!"

"Veser!" the Detective called out sharply as he stumbled away, groping along the flimsy theater chairs.

"I need to get to the book," came the shouted reply from the other end of the building. The Detective didn't have time to look over: he only looked at the chalk on his hands and then to where the half-selkie had thrown the tome, now dangerously close to scattered candles. He bolted towards it, boots slamming on the wooden floor, and heaved the massive leather-bound spell book into his arms, nearly turning directly into another blow. He spun on his heel and ducked around the possessed zombie, running only close enough to Veser and Toni to fling the book towards them, the dust carrying it the rest of the way along the floor. The sea-witch's hand slapped down on the spell-book and the two men locked eyes as the air began to prickle at their skin and Hanna's voice rose behind them in roar of frustration.

"This isn't Hanna," the Detective rasped out, bent in half and gasping for air.

It was a shout from his gut, a statement to confirm what he should know: but Veser looked at him like he didn't know anymore, and he had barely turned when the next swipe of the stand made him roll and curse. He crashed into a chair, head spinning and back stinging cruelly were one of the arm rests had struck his spine. He felt the blood wet his shirt before he actually felt the place an exposed screw had ripped into his forearm, or the sharp pain that came with it.

Opening his eyes, the Detective barely managed to twist onto his back and grab the mic-stand as it slammed into his open palms, grunting as pain jabbed up his arm like a shard of bone, then flipped it over in a massive feat of strength. Using the stand, he forced the possessed zombie to the ground and tore Hanna's fingers away so he could fling the weapon behind them, where it clanged against the floor.

Immediately, the zombie's hand fastened on his neck and he caught it and forced it down with a singular concentration, gasping for air. The tangible prickle of the dead woman's pure fury only fed the fire in his partner's empty eyes as the Detective kneeled above him, keeping him pinned with the strength and reluctance of one who knew what he was dealing with – and knew what that thing was residing in.

"Let him go." He had scarcely heard his own voice so hard and thin. "I will count to three."

"How could you do it?" the dead boy demanded raspily, pushing against his hands as the Detective watched in deep-seated horror, blood seeping under his grip as his arm bled and bled. Hanna arched against the wood, his next words drawn into another scream. "_I trusted you_!"

A convulsion claimed the older man's features, acidic shock and helpless sadness, then suddenly his expression hardened and he forced Hanna down to the ground anew, teeth clenched.

"Listen to me! _Let him go_!"

The anger was real, but there was something different about his voice. It sounded lighter and more echoey, electrified and distanced by the matching watery blue glow that had begun to stream from the older man's open mouth. The Detective's broad shoulders went rigid, his hands clenching around Hanna's thin green wrists with new, different strength.

"Let the boy go, Ieda! You're not helping anyone this way!"

Hanna snarled up at him then went taut again, glowing mouth open. His eyes didn't change, but he went limp. The small zombie looked up at his partner with a rage and a sorrow and a frustration too large to be expressed in words.

After matching that stare with his own, calming or containing or simply acknowledging the pain in front of him, the Detective carefully climbed off of his partner and raised him to his feet, where Hanna stood to the side defensively, arms to his sides. The body language was entirely not Hanna, but stiff and feminine, and a blue aura coalesced around his skinny limbs. Within moments, a woman's image formed over him, cold, beautiful face twisted in dark rage.

"Mom?"

The whisper came from their periphery, where Veser kneeled with the open book. He stared upwards as though he didn't believe it, but the image only became more detailed, every silver hair visible in the weak, sourceless light. It was the same woman from the circle: Ieda, drawn from her cage inside a dead boy's body, floating on his surface like a shimmering oil spill.

The sea-witch opened his mouth to speak, but the glow spread gently to the zombie's partner, flowing up over his chest. A pale man formed over the Detective, the older man's dark coloration and sharp features giving way to blond hair and a weak mouth. Veser stared as the features flickered in and out and accumulated and, finally, settled.

"Lee?"

Veser's whisper cut through the silence of the theater, shaky and weak.

"Hey, Sharkbait," came the soft voice from a thousand miles away, the specter's lips moving just a moment behind the actual words. The smile, pale and helpless, was just as distant.

"Lee, why're …" The teen tried to get to his feet, stumbling slightly. His hand was pressed tightly to his pocket, limbs locked and green eyes wide. "Your finger."

Lee shook his head gently, as though the finger were the least of his worries – like a puppet, the Detective's head shook at exactly the same angle, black eyes filled with the same emotion – then looked at his son.

"I'm so sorry, Ves. I wanted to listen to you."

There was a scratch, like an old tape skipping. Lee tiredly closed his eyes.

"You knew all along, and I went anyways. I couldn't stop myself. Hope you understand." A pause, both too long and too short. "They did horrible things to me."

The Detective's chest whitened like plasma had been poured over his shirt and there was a sudden flash, chilly as a nightmare, of a bare white chest with a gaping black hole right where the heart was supposed to be. It was a black so slick and complete that it had to have been red – torn, pulsing, agonized red.

Veser made a horrified, dying sound and jerked back, green eyes going wide but the image was already gone, and Lee's gentle face was still staring at him, blue eyes both blank and depthless. Veser's breath began to come high and fast, a count-down of slipping sanity.

"Wh-where are you?" he demanded, not pausing as he straightened himself with an artificial strength both brittle and manic, hands visibly shaking. "Where the fuck are you?"

"With your mother," the specter said softly, putting an arm around the shadowy figure of the woman; the Detective's bloody arm mirrored the motion, slipping around Hanna's tiny shoulders. "But you have to stop them."

"Stop them?" Veser repeated, voice cracking. He took a terrified step towards them, fixated on the watery light the two Detectives emitted. "Who's them?"

But Lee acted as if he couldn't hear him. His long white face grew even more worried as he flickered, visibly straining forward as he tried to speak through the mist barrier that was forming between them. His anguish, loose and deep like water, flowed around them, tightening the darkness into a net.

"The docks. I heard something about the new moon, they're doing something at the docks." His eyes began to flicker back and forth, as if losing sight of something little by little. "This is big. Bigger than we ever thought. Everything is connected, and your mother was only the beginning."

"What the hell are you talking about, man?"

It was a whisper, involuntary and perfunctory: a brainstem reaction.

"Someone else might die, Ves. You have to save them."

That phrase — _someone else might die_ — hit Veser like a black flood, making him see the ghostly, watery image in front of him with more than just his eyes. Struck, the teen shook his head, shook it faster and harder and finally let out one horrified, sharp sob, digging his fingers into his silver hair as the image of his father and his mother began to fade into the black.

Lee smiled at him.

"I love you, Sharkbait."

"_Lee_!" Veser screamed, unable even to part his hands from his caving chest or reach out for him. "Lee, no!"

Lee looked down at the woman in his arms and kissed her forehead — the Detective pressed his lips to the fringe of Hanna's red curls, hand cupping his shoulder — and the light dribbled away from Hanna's small form like dew running down a window, leaving him a shadowy figure who crumpled in his partner's arms, eyes closed. The light left the Detective with the same gentleness, but he stayed on his feet, suddenly clamping his arms around the zombie and crushing him close to his chest, eyes wide and wild and terrified and his own once again. Cheeks wet.

The theater was empty, terrifyingly empty, and all eyes fell on Veser. For a moment, the only audible thing was his breath. It moved in and out, wearing away something more – something red and vulnerable – each time.

"God damnit! God … _damnit_, Lee!" he screamed roughly, taking a broken seat and chucking it to the side with all the strength in his body. He struck his way down the row of seats in frenzied jerks of his arms and knees, kicking over the rest of the candles and stumbling and finally falling, knocking over the bowl of seawater. It rushed over the ruined remnants of the chalk circle, smothering the candles in an audible hiss.

Veser crumpled to his knees on the wet ground, tears streaming down his face as he sucked in air in painful, wet jolts, crushing his face into his hands. He shivered and keened and screamed hoarsely and cried and pushed into Toni's warm chest when she fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around him, tucking his head under her chin and holding him until the half-selkie went still and silent.

Smoke twisted up from the fallen candles, spent, and Hanna didn't open his eyes.


	36. To Wake the Dead

**A/N:** Ooh, you will not believe how many loose ends this story has. However, they're all wiggling in anticipation of being worked into a pretty mystery tapestry!

Now, if I had to divide this storyline into parts, chapter 35 would be the end of part I. Thus proceeds part II, which will be followed (only, I hope) by part III. So … buckle up, guys. I'd say I will not be overtly surprised if Miss Tessa and I finish around the same time (after which I would chuckle weakly and lower my eyes and reach for something sharp …)

But rest assured, kids. I want to finish this epic with all of me, no matter what happens to the comic – which you and I both hope will be amusing and amazing us for months or even years to come.

_Warnings: depressed unZombie, general sad, language, oh hey Lamont (:D), Awesome Conrad_

* * *

To Wake the Dead

* * *

Sliced by slanting bars of afternoon yellow, Hanna lay on their couch where he had been placed hours and hours ago, sprawled form looking both too tiny and too heavy to be real.

His round face was turned into the deflated cushions as if nosing away into a dream, but his limp green fingers hung over the edge of the couch, oddly straight. Rigor mortis straight. His eyes were closed and his hair and skin suffered from the lack of blue glow – and in that still shadow, everything looked grey and dry. The gruesome thinness of his stitch-riddled limbs was impossible to ignore and, for the first time, the young man looked like what he was: a corpse.

More than anything, the collection of reality-corroded bones and loose skin looked as though it had never held such inestimable energy, and never would again.

The Detective, bent double in the chair he had brought in from the kitchen, pulled the dead air of the apartment into his aching chest. He pushed his hands over his unshaven face as the breath shuddered back out of him, leaving no change in his battered body or in Hanna. The void remained. Veser sat cross-legged on the floor, chin in his hands as he stared at an old tome laid cross-wise under the bars of light from the small windows. His abnormally large green eyes had long glossed over. The silence between them settled heavier and heavier over Hanna's limp body, as it had done for hours, until the older man suddenly spoke.

"It was your mother."

Veser looked up, but it was nothing more than a motion. There was no recognition in his expression, as if the nerves or wires behind his features had been severed.

The Detective bowed his head, hand clenching along the fresh bandages that he had let Veser strap over his arm after they got back to the apartment, just to stop the bleeding. The young man knew his way around butterfly bandages and it had distracted him for a moment, at least.

"Your mother. After you brought – summoned – her to the theater, I realized I'd been … seeing her in my dreams."

It seemed too passive a term to put to the violence the specter had enacted on him or the pure fury in her as she hunted him, but there was no mistaking her identity. When Lee Falun had possessed him, he had felt an overwhelming emotional spark: it felt like loving something to the point of obsession, and with it came images of the woman. Of Veser's mother. The same woman that was in his dreams.

"She's been in my head since …" It was difficult to measure his life when nights were often longer than days.

"She washed up on the docks on the second of October," Veser supplied from the floor, on the other end of the void. The older man's mouth thinned, thinking on how fast she had found him after being ripped from her body. It was also the morning after they fought the djinn.

"Around that time," he said quietly, and smoothed over the bandage with his fingers again, maybe seeking a twinge or spark of pain to ground him in his hollowed body. For the first time, the half-selkie's eyes were actually locked on him, so unnervingly like his fae mother's. After a beat, he spoke.

"You kill her?"

"No." It was all that came out. There was no spark of indignation or even surprise, just a factuality that matched the dull, gravelly tone of the question itself. The Detective slowly shook his head. "I was in the station that day. And with Hanna directly after."

"Just asking."

From the sound of it, it was the truth.

Veser knew that the older man hadn't killed his mother. It was shockingly obvious to the both of them that there was a bigger force behind both his mother and his father's murder, and that knowledge weighed them into silence again. It was so quiet that a turn of the tome's pages sounded like paper being ripped in half.

The half-selkie had stopped pretending to read a long time ago. However, even if it was a voodoo tome at his feet and Hanna remained unspeakably dead on the couch, the Detective couldn't fault him for it. He simply couldn't find the energy to try. The teen had lost so much in the space of an hour, and the hours since then had done nothing but slowly magnify the loss, releasing it like poison gas into all the normal areas of life – a life you were expected to continue with. What did you do only ten hours after realizing your father was dead and you didn't even know how to find his body?

The Detective felt drained even being peripheral to such loss, or channeling a small portion of it through his own battered body. He couldn't imagine being in the middle of it, at the piercing point.

"Hanna will tell you," he heard himself say. "He was with me."

Veser said nothing. Looking at the small zombie, the older man's only hope was that the losses wouldn't continue.

Surrounded once again with the dark stagnancy of the space they were in, the Detective forced himself to think back on the previous night and the way they had handled it. Everyone who had entered with a pulse had left with one, but the sum damage control of the séance seemed irrelevant or dismal considering how much danger everyone had been in without knowing it. That Veser had dragged innocents into it was of particular concern, but, black luck being with them, they had also chosen the right innocents.

Once everyone had regained their footing and the dust had settled, the sea-witch numbed away what he could of the singer, Jessica's, pains. She would be left with a sore back and a spotty memory. Before they could say anything to Toni – an apology so insufficient it was hardly worth the breath – she took her friend by the arm with an expression as haggard as it was understanding and said _Don't worry. It's Jessica. She won't believe me no matter what I tell her._

She was an amazing soul, clearly more worried for Hanna and Veser and himself than anything, though this time she had every right to be furious at them. She had been possessed and never warned of the danger inherent in such a venture, but said nothing. There was even a stunned element in her expression and a new depth in her gaze that spoke of true acceptance – the kind you couldn't walk away from or even endure passively in your life. She would be all right. Perhaps even better than all right, given a new tool to cope.

They had prevented what deaths they could – tragic though it was, there had never been a way to locate Mr. Falun's captors or location even with the most wishful of hindsight – but the true remnants of the séance were flat on a deflated and holey couch. Moreover, the Detective refused to accept that he had survived the last twelve hours only to realize that there might be nothing to do about Hanna.

The two men had spent the day beside him. Exhausted, the Detective had literally blacked out after Veser saw to his injuries and only woke in the late afternoon, guilty and panicked, to find Hanna in the exact same state. A glassy stare from Veser summarized both the gap and their options.

Once again, the boundary hurt him: he just didn't know what to do. The zombie was like the worst of black boxes. Just a few months into admitting that magic was real, the Detective didn't have the slightest concept of what had been keeping Hanna animated, and if that something was being repressed or was just gone now. The thought – and the resulting inability to _effect_ – was quietly terrifying.

If Hanna came back – when Hanna woke up – he would have to talk to his partner about teaching him magic, or about magic. Basic things. Just enough so he could help. Just enough so he could stop being useless, or at least stop another episode like the djinn circle.

But looking at him, the Detective realized that he had long become accustomed to _this_ Hanna: green skin, luminous eyes, stitches and the faint smell of locked closets. Suddenly, his appearance was as alien as it was familiar. It seemed a curious color-set overlayed on what had once been a pink and breathing, living young man, and the Detective was forced to remember that Hanna had not always been like this – and waking him up was only the first step to giving him back what he'd lost, something he still intended to do in one way or another.

"When you said he could be brought back," the zombie's partner began hoarsely, reaching back into a dark dock warehouse in his memory. He looked down at the sea-witch, who had been nothing but an insulting young hoodlum then. "Were you telling the truth?"

"No," Veser answered after a moment. He let his head drop. "Hanna's dead. If there's any power that can bring him back, I've never heard of it. I just said that because I thought I'd get a tip out of it."

_And I thought I'd never see you again_ was the unspoken addendum. It took him a moment to actually _hear_ what Veser had said.

When he did, the Detective's eyes shut and the pain of it all had barely crashed up against the weakened wall of his heart, weighing his head into his hands, when there came a loud banging at the door of his apartment.

He looked up; hand slapped flat against his spell book, Veser looked like a spooked cat, oversized green eyes wide and shoulders high. The Detective didn't make any move to get up, which was just as well, as the door (unlocked: after so much rending spiritual danger he had forgotten about earthly precautions) was battered in a spare second later. After an unholy clatter and the noisy crinkle of plastic, a muffled _fuckfuckfuckfuck_ burst into a far more audible string of curse-words as a leggy figure of argyle and gelled hair stumbled into the apartment, juggling two bulging bags in either hand.

The sea-witch and the Detective looked up almost uncomprehendingly as Conrad Achenleck kicked the door shut behind him with a massive sound of consternation, the effort sending him pitching into the wall and another clearly uncontrollable rant.

"Fuck, what happened to all of that bollocks about answering your phone when I call? Jesus _Christ_, do you have any idea what it takes to _find_ this place? It's like a fucking bomb shelter! I was going to do a good deed and bring you poor bastards some food while you help that punk with the mouthful of knives, and look what that gets me! I swear to god, I had your little business card and everything but your _office_ didn't show up on the map – haha, and why _would_ it, Google doesn't believe in vampires either – so I had to find my way here by asking, Jesus no one _does_ that anymore, and so I got lost and a hooker tried to _kiss me_ and god _damnit_ you are so lucky my leg isn't a ball of puss anymore. I'm doing the ex-cripple triathlon after this, my calves are going to be the size of fucking watermelons, or at least one of them –"

"Conrad."

The Detective's voice was so flat, so destroyed, that it brought Conrad to a complete halt as though a plug had been pulled: he froze, one white shoe in the living room, one in the hallway, his glasses askew on his beaked nose. Finally the coroner breathed out, cheeks pink, and ducked to swipe a bag-laden hand through his hair as he looked at the motionless zombie on the couch.

"Holy shit," he managed after a minute, brows knitting. He looked to the Detective, a _what the hell happened to you_ expression flitting across his face. "I thought he couldn't sleep?"

There was no answer, which made one of the plastic bags drop from Conrad's reddened and twisted fingers and smack against the floor. The smell of curry spilled unnoticed into the cramped apartment, warm and out of place: from another world, almost, transplanted into that grey sphere. Shelving the other bag onto the kitchen table without looking, the coroner walked forward with only the slightest of limps.

"Is he sick?" he asked hesitantly, fingers knotting in front of his askew tie as he looked over the small zombie's heavily arranged limbs.

"He's broken. Or – " Veser pronounced – or, rather, slithered – an unrecognizable word, then shrugged himself double again. "Zombie equivalent of sick, I guess. He got possessed and I think that ... fucked with his motus. It's hard to see what to do in hoodoo, though. Most of the rites in here are for creating zombies or banishing them, not for restoring them. They're kinda disposable and don't have a very long shelf-life anyways."

Conrad had stared into nothingness through the explanation, nauseousness visibly mounting second by second, until Veser finished that sentence. It was as if the coroner had been slapped, ruffled form straightening as some kind of internal connection was made and he took in every possible visual cue in the living room all at once. Shooting the crouching sea-witch a look that said Hanna was _clearly_ not disposable, Conrad didn't have time to think about how big of a mistake he'd made in getting wrapped up with these kooks when he turned on his heel, face afire, and went right back to the door.

"Where are you going?" the Detective forced out, half-rising. His hand was out as if to slow or stop him, a stunned look on his long face.

"If he's sick, he needs a fucking doctor."

Face grim, the coroner looked back to the couch and its tiny dead zombie – god forbid, his tiny dead friend – before ripping open the door.

"A real one."

* * *

Forty-five minutes and a harried disemboweling of his closet later, Conrad screeched up to a chipped span of parking-meter-less sidewalk and nearly ate that selfsame sidewalk as he heaved himself out of the car, breathing loud and heavy. Slapping the hood, he righted himself and ran-limped-skipped toward the mouth of an alleyway, which looked very bare-bones and shabby without the sinister tint of night to give it threat-rich ambiance. The coroner also didn't give himself time to think about how this wasn't at all how he had imagined returning to the skeevy third door on the right – which was _under no circumstances_ – but pulled the heavy metal thing open and limped inside.

From the brilliance of a winter afternoon, his eyes had to adjust to the dim light that was nothing more than a yellow stain to the shabby concrete walls. For a moment, all he saw was the big, nearly beastly outline of a man standing behind the desk, one hand to his ear and the other clenched into the back of a swivel chair.

"— elaide, I know you're getting these. I wouldn't keep calling if I just wanted to get a drink, okay? I mean – god _damn_ it. Look, I need to talk with you. Immediately. There's someone in town that – "

Three things happened in quick succession: the door shut, Conrad's eyes adjusted and the contractor – Lamont Toucey – stopped talking. The big man straightened and looked around, clearly annoyed, then did a double-take at the prissily dressed man stranded in his office doorway. The cell-phone dropped from his ear and he automatically punched the end-call button, his dark eyes wide.

"Sweater-vest?" he exclaimed.

"_Sweater-vest_?" Conrad repeated, not even hearing how high his voice swung as he stared in half-baked shock at the contractor. Lamont instantly sunk low, as if the near-shriek had punctured him, then breathed out thickly and looked to the side, expression torn.

"Uh, I mean. Shit." Lamont swallowed and seemed to get a grip on himself – or more accurately, the situation, which seemed to be on his _under no circumstances_ list as well. He flipped his phone shut and stowed it in his khaki pocket, next trying for a forcibly neutral tone of voice. "You ... looking for Worth?"

"Lu — Worth. Yes. I know he sleeps here sometimes and I need to see him _right_ now," Conrad insisted, loosening his coat collar from its sweaty cling. He could feel every bulging blood-cell of the flush in his neck, almost as pressing as his mission. "It's about Hanna."

"Whoss' about Hanna?"

Lamont's eyes went wide in a strangely immediate way, but Conrad's attention was on Luce, who was striding out of the back room and shrugging on his fur-trimmed coat with a hard look in his eye. For a moment, the fact that all three of them were in the room at the same time seemed like some sort of a meeting between previously rumored-to-exist people. The instant strangeness dissipated quickly enough, however, or Conrad just ignored it as he stepped forward, hands clamped tightly on the lapels of his wool peacoat.

"It's Hanna," he repeated stupidly. "You need to come and see him."

Luce's reaction was not at all expected. The stringy vampire just propped himself on Lamont's desk and leaned back, spider-like hand slipping into his coat to rummage for something.

"Y'ain't gettin' me back in yer lil' east-side dollhouse that easy. Know iss' hard sleepin' alone, but all the big boys do it. An' yannoe what happened ta the boy who cried wolf, doncha?"

"I – what?" Conrad somehow formed words, which was a remarkable feat, considering how wide his mouth was hanging open.

"Got 'imself eaten. … Shit. Guess that'd be rewardin' ya, then." The vampire squinted up at the water-stained ceiling for a minute, freed cigarette clamped between his fingers. He then tipped the death-stick at the coroner. "Point is, can't just be yer fucktoy, Peaches. Gotta do some work 'round here, else Monters'll gimme the boot. Or try ta. Y'keep bustin' my balls like this, though, you'll end up suckin' more outta me than I ever did outta you."

Lamont's eyebrows shot up to his delicately high hairline at fairly super-sonic speeds, mouth flattening – something Conrad saw just long enough to turn the fuck away from, becoming so painfully flustered and migrainey that he almost forgot why he was there.

"That's – _not_ – not _even_ – " Conrad blustered, chest catching. He was far too aware of the contractor's eyes on him, labeling him as a sex fiend who over-enjoyed the company of dead men, but finally rattled his head and pointed toward the exit of the office, all of his jittering ire and determination snapping his arm straight as a rod. "_You. Hanna. That miserable apartment. Now_."

"Fer the last time, m'busy."

"You're smoking a fucking cigarette!" Conrad burst out indignantly, and Luce nodded, flicking a lighter.

"M'busy smoking a fuckin' cigarette. Ain't seein' him." He bit his cigarette upwards to get the tip into the flame, a criminally bored look on his scruffy face, and nodded towards the heavy metal door. "If'ya hadn't noticed, there's a psycho out fer my hide and I don't fancy wanderin' around in the dark. Or gettin' meself fried 'fore he can do the honors of strippin' m'skin from m'bones an' makin' a suit ovvit. Sides, god knows the kid's already croaked, ain't much more kin happen to 'im."

"You are _seeing him_."

Luce opened his mouth as if to protest, or mock him for a piteous lack of variety in his attack, but Conrad had had enough. He stalked forward, feeling the furious red in his neck and ears, and took hold of the front of the vampire's coat, rattling him like the mulish fucker wasn't immortal and a smirking death-weapon and nearly strong enough to lift a car.

"For Christ's sake, you are Hanna's doctor — his _real_ doctor – and even though he's dead, there is something _seriously_ wrong with him. This isn't a ripped stitch or something solvable with ... with a liberal application of mothballs! He's _double-dead_."

For some reason, Conrad knew that was the one thing that would get Luce moving. If he knew it was something graver than a busted arm-stitch, he would help Hanna. The vampire had always helped him before and, whether motivated by pity or grudging love, that part of the undead prick would remain as long as Hanna had some manner of life to be threatened.

True to plan – and perhaps the only time he had been absolutely right about Luce – the vampire straightened, smoldering cigarette now sticking at an aggressive angle from his jumbled yellow teeth.

"What 'appened?" he growled, voice suddenly deep. Conrad let go of his coat-front and sucked in a breath like his were numbered.

"The – the stupid little punk with the teeth, the sea-wizard or whoever, he said that Hanna got possessed and now he's not moving. Really not moving, I mean, he can't even open his eyes – "

"_Ghosts_?" Luce fairly roared, making Conrad jump. Then he bared his needle fangs and was stalking past Conrad – towards the door – before the other man could move. Stunned, the coroner watched Luce pass him with a demented look in his eye and shove through the doorway, then, once the metal door fell shut again, he turned his bleached face to Lamont. A beat landed between them, awkward and off-key.

"Ghosts?" Conrad asked, arms stupendously limp at his sides.

"Hanna had a history with ghosts," Lamont said faintly, staring at the door without an ounce of assurance in his round face or lined eyes.

Conrad looked at Lamont looking at the door, then remembered seeing the wholly unimpressive cracked brick wall when he came in, meaning it had technically been daylight outside when he arrived and that didn't bode at all well for creatures of the night. Throat suddenly tight, he turned to chase after the undead and possibly suicidal idiot known as Luce, then tensed up as something clamped onto his arm.

It was Lamont Toucey, the supernatural contractor and mostly stranger. Bent halfway over his desk, the big man was looking at Conrad with the same expression as before, only now more hesitant and riddled with caged anxiety. His gaze was so intense, it verged on pleading. His lightly furred fingers held onto Conrad's arm gingerly as if afraid to truly clamp down – or commit to the motion itself.

"How is he?" the big man asked hoarsely. When the coroner only looked at him without recognition, Lamont swallowed audibly. "Hanna."

"He's dead," Conrad said starkly, and the fact settled between them like lead. He swallowed too, and inclined his head. "Otherwise, he's the happiest corpse I've ever seen. And I've seen a few."

They stood there like that for a moment. Then, after just one more moment, Lamont let go and nodded towards the doorway. Conrad left with a palpitating stride that became a run by the time he shoved his weight against the big metal door.

Out in the alleyway, he didn't know what he expected to see, but it all made a miserable kind of sense. Luce was clinging close to the alley wall, just outside the line of yellow sunlight that guillotined down the brick. Maybe it was just the sunlight's clammy reflection off the wall, but his skin looked strangely grey and wet, like he was sweating profusely in the freezing air. The vampire looked over when Conrad exited but his chin fell back to his chest immediately afterward, his voice no more than a growl.

"Pull the fuckin' car up."

Conrad looked at him like he was insane, because clearly he was.

"You got a car, don'cha, faggot? Boxy metal thing with four rubber doughnuts?" Luce demanded before the coroner could question that lack of sanity, sliding yet lower on the wall with an expression that bordered on nauseated. The undead doctor's voice was sharper now, but sharp and rough like shards of broken concrete; Conrad could actually hear the pressure put on him by the glare of the sun.

He didn't have time to tell him he was crazy. Truth was, Luce probably already knew, and Conrad really didn't want to get bitched at by a madman for wasting time when the bastard was already cooking himself.

"I ... listen, I have my coat back there, but even the backseat has windows."

Conrad was going to say that he also didn't want the scent of sizzling vampire flesh permanently trapped in his upholstery, but Worth silenced him by looping his coat over his head like some sort of fucked-up Eskimo and edging closer to the line of sunlight bronzing the crumbling bricks, then pointing beyond it.

"Trunk don't have windows," he said with a jerk of his head. When Conrad just stood in place, doing the math, Luce Worth twisted towards him. For a second, the filthy fur and stubble and the gunmetal concentration in his red eyes made him look raggedly wolf-like as he bared his teeth and hissed:

"So pull that fuckin' buggy up, Peaches. Doc Worth's gotta make a house-call."


	37. Reveal

A/N: Yaaaaaaaaay! Echo fully intended, pain and all, and OH MY GOD THAT PLOT.

_Warnings: language, moar depressed unZombie, Long Overdue Reunitings and the more Sense-Makey part of the previously seen Plot with an Uncomfortable Amount of Remaining Questions_

* * *

Reveal

* * *

"You heard what he said."

The living-room was a void all over again.

Conrad's visit seemed more hallucination than anything concrete: the floor was clear of take-out bags only by the grace of Veser's rote tidying on the way to a glass of water, but the food inside remained untouched and chilled more and more by the moment. The way that Conrad had stalked off almost brought the Detective some relief, even as the older man was subconsciously alarmed by the idea of the coroner taking things into his own hands. He would like to believe that Conrad always had good intentions, but that still left method and execution to consider, which the older man was beginning to learn were the pitfalls suffered by many.

Still, the coroner had said something about a doctor. Mostly he had said something about helping Hanna, which was much more than the two of them were accomplishing, even with five tomes and a major in sea-magic between them. Just for a moment, it felt like there was a doorstop in the closing portal that was Hanna's unlife, but it just gave the exhausted older man enough room to take one breath – and start thinking about everything else.

"You heard it, didn't you?"

Veser just looked over at him, a string of pale beads now looped around his hand and wrist, unnervingly tooth-like in their irregularity and plaque-like yellowing. He pressed them under his chin, his oversized fae eyes as empty as he felt, but with a near-imperceptible shadow of reservation. If he did remember what Hanna had said while possessed, he didn't want to be the one to release it into the stagnant air of the den. The fact that it already felt like speaking ill of the dead disturbed the Detective to his core.

The older man took a silent breath and scraped his fingers along his scalp, letting his aching spine lower him to his knees, where he leaned double and covered his mouth.

"He said I killed him," he said blankly, into his palm.

After a moment, the sea-witch shrugged with one shoulder, head listing to the side as he dragged another of his tomes between his knees and began to flip through it.

"He was channeling her. Coop anger like that up for a while and it doesn't give a shit who it gets its hands on."

"How can you be sure?"

A look – such brittle succinctness would have been impossible without the toxic hue of his eyes – said he couldn't.

The Detective sat back for the hundredth time, wiry arms falling palms-up to his sides. Gravity leeched the last of the energy from him, but he couldn't shut his dry eyes. He didn't try. His gaze was drawn to the relentless blinding orange of the dying day outside, perhaps because it distracted his senses from his charred insides, or because the concept of evening had ceased to make sense to him. He was adrift in a dark place without time, one that had taken hold of him the moment that the suffocating presence of Lee Falun had exited his body and he realized that Hanna wasn't moving.

The hours-long struggle to find something to cure the small zombie seemed at once an eternity and a half-hour, and now that their best chance lay with Conrad, all he could think about was what the small zombie had said – screamed at him – before he had managed to restrain his possessed partner.

The Detective had never seen anyone so angry. The emotion he felt surging out of the zombie had been real, curling and cracking him at his seams and driving the young man's empty body forward, but it hadn't been as foreign as he had expected. Truthfully – terrifyingly – it had felt like Hanna.

"Look, it's impossible to tell."

A heavy book slammed shut and the older man looked over to see Veser hunched over, glaring at his own scraped fingers. Any reluctance the younger man might have felt had been boiled down in the wasteland of his mind and siphoned into a stoic stare.

"It's pretty obvious that she was nothing but a hot mess of rage and blood-lust at that point, even if she'd only been left to boil for a month. Hanna should've taught you a thing or two about ghosts. People don't hang around post-croak just because they forgot to do laundry."

"Something has to compel them to stay here ... or to come back," the Detective said quietly, remembering the ghost of the man protecting his granddaughter from the Japanese cat spirit.

"Yeah. Location and method of death matter the most, but in violent deaths, the strongest emotion definitely gets left behind. Revenge was my mom's MO, but, I mean, the stuff that came out of Hanna's mouth ..."

"What?" he asked, straightening at the slight burr in the teen's voice. It was the only emotion he had heard in hours, and the sea-witch confirmed his frustration or confusion by bundling down further, clawing his fingers into the baggy sleeves of his tattered hoodie.

"It's just fuckin' weird, okay? It sounded like classic revenge tourettes, but sometimes possession can bring out parts of you even you didn't know you had. She could have even accessed Hanna's locked memories and just let 'em loose like a berserker. Like I said, possession is a rat-maze inside your own head. Pumped full of that much anger, a psycho witch on your heels, you'd shoot toward the worst thing that ever happened to you."

The idea of Hanna holding that much anger – ever, for anyone – made the Detective feel like he was swallowing down the tar-like blackness trying to surge up from underneath his scar. It was too much to process. The rational part of him put a hand to his jerking mental ribcage, trying to streamline his thoughts.

They knew Hanna had been murdered. They knew he had been stabbed seven times in the back with a strangely-shaped knife. The anger he had seen in Hanna could very well be representative of the event that led him to his death.

The older man tried to say _of course_ and take the facts into himself, but he could not move past the last thing Hanna had said: _I trusted you._

"What are the chances that your mother was murdered by someone she trusted?"

"Pretty fucking slim," Veser grunted, wedging a bead between his razor-teeth. He bit down absently, slicing his knuckle and sucking on it in the same motion, unaware of the older man's dark eyes trained intensely on his profile. "She was a paranoid old bat. Didn't really get on with anybody but selkies and, y'know, exiled. Wasn't just one person who did it, either. He … Lee said 'they'. He definitely said 'they.'"

The name brought it all rushing back.

The Detective looked down, an unidentifiable emotion or pressure moving up his body as he clasped his hands in front of himself, long fingers shaking visibly. He tried to say something back, perhaps something about Lee Falun or how sorry he was; how much he had _felt_ how sorry Lee was about everything, the only comprehensive emotion he had retained from that suffocating inundation of love and self-pity and raw purpose that he couldn't possibly put into words even as he knew Veser might want to hear how his foster father had truly felt for him. The Detective even began to ask how they could begin to connect the murders of his parents to something 'larger than they had ever thought', but found that he couldn't.

He just glanced up at Hanna's still form on the couch and immediately looked away so quickly it qualified as a flinch, confusion and preemptive dread knotting under his Adam's apple.

"You don't seriously think he was talking to _you_."

Once again, Veser's nasal voice surprised him, as did his ability to duck around what truly hurt him. This time, the older man had to think about the tone in it before he recognized it as the thinnest veneer of incredulity, reflected in the irritated wrinkle of the teen's pug nose.

"Like I said, if that _was_ Hanna, she was letting his memories out helter-skelter. You were just the person he saw first, and whoever his memory reel wanted you to be. And besides, you said you guys met a few months ago, in an alley or whatever. If he's been in the ground for a year, how could you have killed him?"

"I can't remember anything from before a year ago," the Detective said sharply, fingers clenching about each other. Then he made himself relax and breathe in, sliding his hands together. "We found some hunters Hanna knew when he was alive. They said that Hanna was looking for me and maybe … he found me. And maybe I killed him."

Veser soaked all of this in uncertainly, then narrowed his eyes at the zombie's partner.

"Dude, we're talking about ghosts and demons here, not unicorns. We've got enough crazy to deal with without conspiracy theories, and I can pretty much guarantee you're not a murderer. Not with the way I saw you bro out with him." The Detective was about to crack his caving chest open and express that festering _doubt_ that he'd managed to talk away – the possibility that he was a far different person now than he had been before – but Veser kicked one of his old tomes away with a disgusted sound, cocking one patched knee and popping a kink in his neck. "So you both are memory-locked? That's fucked-up."

"I'm not memory-locked," the older man said without thinking, then looked over at the sea-witch. "Could I be? I thought it was just amnesia, but … could I have a spell on me as well?"

"Maybe. I could try and see."

Taking a prolonged stare as an affirmative, Veser took a minute to lurch tiredly to his feet and then crossed the distance between them.

The older man sat back with wide eyes, almost too numb to feel the split-second stirring of apprehension as the half-selkie carelessly invaded his personal space, whipping the free length of beads twice around his palm. First absently yanking his hoodie straight and glaring down at him, Veser bowed his head and muttered in a distinctly different language than the celtic spell, holding his bead-wrapped hand close to his mouth. The Detective jerked slightly when the sea-witch breathed out and bit into his knuckle. His needle teeth slid deep; a brilliant thread of red raced down his finger and wound down the length of beads, quickly gathering at the bottom and smacking audibly onto the wooden floor. When Veser extended his bleeding fist toward the older man's face, the sheer number of scars that slid into focus was staggering and a blunt reminder of the inescapably visceral nature of magicks.

Everything in the ether had a price of flesh.

The Detective's breath caught in his chest as he felt or imagined something buzzing insistently in his periphery; Veser's bloody hand was soon too close to focus on as it moved right between his eyes. It traveled down his body in complete silence. Veser's focused expression made it look as if he were scanning for something past the older man's skin, an unearthly sliver of bright green visible between his dove-grey lashes. Closing his eyes, the older man tried to breathe and relax, but the nagging energy sound-sensation fought him and slowly drove his nails into his leg.

When the scan reached his chest, he opened his eyes in time to see Veser tighten in front of him for a second before he was visibly knocked back a fraction, hand retracting and face blanking. His face then crumpled in confusion and he drew back his hand even further, pressing it to his chest.

"What? What was that?" the older man demanded, hand clenched stiffly atop his thigh. The moment Veser had retracted his hand, or the electrified air that had clung around it, his limbs suddenly came alive with pins and needles.

"Dunno. Never happened before," Veser answered. After a moment, he put his hand out and wiggled his fingers as though they were no longer connected to his body, clearing his throat. He looked very, very unsure. "I'm probly off my game or ... something. But it looks like you got a knock to the head. It's no memory charm I've seen, at least."

The older man sat back, but the next deep breath did nothing to avail him of either the bottle-necked sense of anticipation or the irritating buzzing he felt still trickling down in his limbs. A knock to the head it was, then. He wondered briefly if Veser would have something to say after looking at the stapled-over scar on his chest, considering that the spirit of his mother had been so intent on ripping it open, but the time for his own questions and issues was over. The Detective nodded shortly and went back to watching Hanna's blank face, the malaise of silence settling back over them as if it had never left.

Veser took a few unsteady steps away, then looked at the older man long and hard, putting his finger to his nose.

"Since we're talking personal, here … I wasn't gonna say anything, but you stink."

"I do?" the Detective murmured, looking down at the rest of his wiry self as if he'd forgotten it was there. In the clench and worry for Hanna's safety, he may very well have willed himself into nonexistence but for the mild wounds that kept pulling him back into his body. After staring uncomprehendingly at both the clothed span of his scarred chest and the dirty bandages on his arm, he cautiously raised his hand to his own nose, wondering why the teen had chosen just then to care about his hygiene. Veser grimaced, flashing his lamprey teeth, and nodded once.

"Yeah. Like a dead person. I was just chocking it up to Hanna, because, y'know, walking corpse, but you seriously reek."

"Thank god somebody's got a fuckin' nose in this place."

The two men looked over to see a gaunt man in a white lab-coat standing in the open doorway, hands hooked into claws.

What began as a sneer of disgust and aggression twisted into a snarl of unmitigated rage when he caught sight of Hanna laid out flat on the couch, unmoving. Before the Detective could rise to his feet, the stranger stalked over and began to brusquely test the zombie's unresponsive form, raising his skinny limbs and pushing his eye-lids up and finally slapping his cheek, then looked up. When the man's eyes fell on the Detective, they flared red with rage and the next moment — after a blurr of white and a distortion of air — he was at the Detective's throat, needle teeth bared.

"_The hell'd you do to him_?" he roared, hoisting the Detective up by the collar much like he had done in the alleyway so long ago. It had taken the older man up until that moment – and that grip – to recognize the vampire, which was a case of pitifully bad recall he didn't have the oxygen to chide himself for. His attacker's strength was so colossal for his skinny frame that it sent the other man staggering with a squeezed noise, hands clamped onto the vampire's bamboo wrists.

"_Luce_!" Conrad bellowed from the doorway, which actually made the vampire look over.

Maybe it was the way he was keeping weight off of his barely-healed leg or the resulting battered irritation in his stance, but Conrad, flushed and sporting a half-opened peacoat, actually looked like a force to be reckoned with in that moment. The coroner then ruined whatever small ounce of command he'd exerted by looking downright _startled_ that it had actually worked. The vampire's lip instantly curled up and stuck there as he turned back to the man in his hands, red eyes picking him apart.

"You smell like a fuckin' graveyard and I don't trust you any further'n I can throw you, and even then's a sight too far," he hissed, close enough for the Detective to feel the creature's tepid, uneven breath on his cheek. "An if I find out that you let Hanna get near any ghosts, I'm gonna fill you so full'a holes —"

"Luce, seriously."

Though lower and a touch more exhausted, Conrad's reprimand still had the desired effect. After freezing for a second like a scolded beast, Luce snorted at him, actually growled deep and gravelly, then dropped the Detective without a word of warning and paced back over to Hanna.

Veser had watched the tense event with one hand in his jeans, the nasty expression on his face an assurance that something equally unpleasant was within reach in his pocket, but ended up stumbling to get out of the vampire's way. In doing so, he cast a look that was equal parts mystified and wildly resentful to the older man. The Detective, however, was leaning woundedly on his chair and rubbing his neck and clearly had no answers for him.

Conrad appeared too mortified to offer them a real look of embarrassment or an apology, and so settled on a harried bit of eye-contact before limping over to Hanna's bedside to close all the living room shades against the last slivers of the reddening sun. Vehemently muttering to himself, the vampire was ignoring this helpfulness and was instead pulling things helter-skelter out of what the paranormal investigator realized was a skinny, fur-lined coat. A lab-coat.

This, evidently, was the doctor Conrad had gone to call.

So, taking the coroner's trust as their own, they let him 'work'. Once the vampire had been labeled as a non-threat and the situation seemed under control, Veser hovered on the edges of the tiny living room, obviously intensely intrigued. Possibly he had never seen a 'live' vampire before, and the Detective didn't begrudge him the late introduction. It was only by a sense of necessity that Hanna's partner gave the tetchy undead man the space he seemed to need, barely having the presence of mind to observe some truly strange interactions between the vampire and their coroner friend: ones that he felt didn't truly illustrate the last serial harassment update Conrad had given him and left a lot of questions to be answered. Mostly, the vampire very much appreciated his own sense of organization in his work environment and seemed surprised and irritated to find a helpful human underfoot.

"Ey, the holy hell're ya – that's my shit!"

"Wha – you threw it on the ground!"

"Yeah, an on the ground is where I want it, ya OCD faggot. Quit tryin' ta play nurse an' get ta work on that nong's DVD collection. "

"You are such a _bastard_. I was trying to -"

"Only kinda nurse I ever had a use for wears nipple tassles, Peaches, so if you don't got any'a them, you kin fuck right off. Yer not a real doctor, lord only knows how much you'd fuck up nursin'."

"I – you –!"

"In fact, fuck off anyways. This here's classified."

"He's, Christ, he's our zombie ... too. I guess. Not just yours! What are you doing to him that's so _classified_?"

"If I told ya, it wouldn't be fuckin' classified anymore, now would it?"

"Ohgo_fuck_yourself."

Just when the Detective was about to speak, either to ask who the undead man was or just request that Conrad stop interfering in whatever he was doing, the white-coated vampire thrust a hand out for quiet or stillness or both. Once the living room was as still as a grave, he put down a suspicious-looking orange pill bottle and tapped some freshly-crushed powders into a folded piece of paper, then went down on his knee and placed the paper v underneath Hanna's upturned green nose. Next, he bent with an air of concentration and, pinching one nostril shut, blew it up the zombie's nose.

The trumpet-esque sound made everyone in the room straighten; the Detective would have seen Veser staring at him with a severely disturbed expression if his own eyes hadn't been locked on Hanna, unchanged on the couch. His hand tightened on the back of the cheap kitchen chair, not so much telling himself to hang back but finding himself incapable of interfering.

"Oy, kid. Wakey-wakey," the vampire grunted above him, glaring at the limp zombie for no more than a few seconds before following the medical treatment with another sound slap to the face. "Oy!"

Mouth popping open, Conrad grabbed for his hand to prevent another blow, fury and disbelief competing for dominance on his splotchy face – then sneezed. Except it was too high-pitched and sudden to come from anyone older than twenty-five, and both Conrad and the vampire's heads snapped around, leaving them staring at the couch.

Between Conrad's finely tailored slacks, the Detective saw a bony green hand twitch then splay out like a palm-frond, shaking.

"Oh man, woah, wow, whad habbend, oh by – _jeez_ – agghk, 'by dose – "

The sound of Hanna's voice, no matter how stunned and stuffy, made the cruel fist around the older man's heart squeeze once then relax with a painful creak. He let out a breath so sharp it was almost a bark, clammy hand covering his forehead. The vampire made no expression of joy. On the contrary, he flicked the used bit of paper at the zombie's head with a disdainful noise.

"Yeah, had to go the nasal route: usually it's a bit easier ta get this stuff in ya, but it's yer fault fer losin' all'a yer damn blood. Who loses _all_ their fuckin' blood and still has the nerve ta keep prancin' around?"

When that seemed to cause no response except for more muffled choking and some muted wiggling, the vampire stepped back and the Detective got his first actual glimpse of his partner, who was half-propped on a skinny green elbow, eyes clenched shut. Then the undead man leaned over so far that he nearly halved his impressive height, red eyes narrowed to vengeful slits. He gave the dead boy a hard poke in the sternum and the sound was like a smack on a leathery drum.

"So _what'd I tell ya_," the vampire grit out, fangs inches from his patient's nose. His sense of personal space was clearly something he had left in his human body. "'Bout_ ghosts?_"

"Um, nothing?" Hanna answered weakly, still groping around with his eyes shut. From the left, Conrad's hand mysteriously produced a handkerchief and Hanna scrubbed at his face with it, at least having the good sense not to blow his nose.

"No, m'pretty sure it was somethin' else," the vampire hissed mockingly, scratching at his stubble with truly terrifying nails, then actually took Hanna by the shirt and waggled him. "I said _no ghosts!"_

"_But -" _Hanna outright whined, fumbling with his thick-framed glasses that Conrad had tucked into his other hand.

"None_. No more." _The undead man released him with a shove, bullying urges apparently satisfied. Hanna bounced as much as their deflated couch could offer and coughed feebly, poking his glasses onto his nose.

"Come on, you don't even know what ha — " he began groggily, peering up into the vampire's pale face for an uncomprehending moment before his glowing blue eyes snapped open and he scrambled up onto the arm of the couch, face drawn. "Woah! Who are _you_?"

The vampire opened his mouth to snap something more, then his pale, narrow features hardened, fangs hooked over his thin lip. Struck, he huffed out a single breath of air and stepped back, long fingers twitching absently at his sides. Conrad watched him worriedly, realizing something the others didn't, then swallowed when Luce crossed his arms and glared at the crumpled dead boy – the dead boy who used to be alive, but was now crouched on the arm of a couch, looking up at him in fear.

Fear, and no recognition whatsoever.

"I'm yer fuckin' doctor, kid."

"Conrad's my doctor," Hanna said uncertainly, looking very caught with his thumbnail wedged against his teeth and his knees knocking together nervously.

"Iss'e, now," Luce said suspiciously, casting a very displeased look to his left, where Conrad shrugged lamely and muttered something about giving his five weeks notice about two months ago. After a moment, Luce snorted again and turned back to the zombie, rolling up his sleeve with an officiousness equal parts relieving and fearsome.

"Well god help ya you've survived this long. I'm here ta patch whatever he fucked up an' whatever you've managed ta do ta yerself in the meantime, you right? Now sit still, I gotta get a damage count after these nongs nearly let you fall apart."

Without waiting for any form of permission, the vampire began to press and poke at him, making various noises that expressed various levels of escalating disgust and snapping at Conrad if he knew how to sew a straight line because_ Jesus Christ 'is arm is nearly fallin' off and lookit these fuckin' holes what do you think he is a fuckin' cross-stitch mat,_ and so on and so forth.

Hanna appeared immensely unnerved the entire time, suffering the rag-doll treatment in silence as if he knew it would go better for him that way. This worked until Luce started barking questions at him. The zombie answered them in a suffering way that Conrad could see was very, very natural to him; suddenly, like a shift in clouds, he saw how they must have been while Hanna was alive.

He could see it: Hanna crawling back to Luce on a weekly basis, bleeding and giggling, and answering his accusing questions miserably, hearing the _you bloody idiot_ beneath every one of them. Probably averaging four or five slaps a month. The thought made him twinge a bit on the inside, and if a hypothetical situation was doing that to him, he couldn't imagine how much it was tearing through Luce's immortal viscera.

Veser watched from the kitchen, the only other chair turned around, back between his knees. The Detective remained waiting out of sight and out of reach as well, but the ball of his foot had begun to tap at the floor and it had long become clear that Hanna wasn't going to drop off into that dreadful paralysis again: he wanted to talk to his partner, or just let him know that he was there. He could feel himself at the fringes of the scene like he felt in the office: forgotten, overlooked, but not by any rudeness or personal shortcoming. He naturally faded into the fabric of the environment, but this time he wanted – needed – to be involved. Still, there was technically some sort of healing process going on, and only when the vampire flung the dead boy's arm down and stepped away in disgust did the Detective begin to approach.

Before he could even reach Hanna's side, the doctor stopped in between them and whirled with a dramatic sweep of his lab-coat, hands entrenched in his pockets and cock of his horribly thin shoulders spelling business.

"I'm keepin you under observation, kid." Nearly everyone opened their mouths, but the look in the vampire's dark-ringed eyes would not be trifled with. "I don't give a shit if you don't trust me. Yer gonna sit in front'a me the whole night and if I see so much as a flicker in those blue lightbulbs'a yours, yer in deep shit."

"I think I'm ... staying over too," Conrad spoke up after a moment, holding in a sigh. The Detective looked over at him in weary surprise and Conrad shrugged, offering weakly: "My curfew is up."

One glance revealed that night had finally overtaken the city, heavy black blotting out even the poor, crumbling urban skyline visible from their window. Below the lopsided panel of black glass, Hanna was talking in a rising voice.

"Look, I don't care if you stay over – we don't have any coffins so you'll have to rough it – but I need to talk to Imogen – Imogen?"

"Imogen? The fuck kind of a fairy princess name is that?" Luce fairly spat, looking as if it had been confirmed that he really did hate everything about the man.

"The name of the hour," Conrad breathed out as the Detective finally slipped between them, concern deeply carved into his unshaven face.

"Yes, Hanna?"

The vampire turned towards him. The twitch of his lip to expose his yellowed fangs was purely territorial, but the Detective was too tired to care. What he did care about was the nearly manic energy pouring out of Hanna and the way the young zombie nearly fell off the couch reaching for him, all grasping hands and open mouth. The older man moved over to him just as Hanna gripped onto his torn sleeves and found the words, blue eyes wide.

"She was trying to _kill you_!"

"Who?" he managed to say before Hanna yanked at him harder, trying to stand up and instantly falling back to the couch as his knees gave way underneath him like bendy straws.

"Her! The witch, Veser's mom, the woman with the silver hair and the honkin' huge green eyes just like his."

"How do you ... what?" It was as if something clammy and immovable had just clamped itself at the base of his brain, preventing any other information from getting in. He looked down at Hanna with an almost infantile helplessness. "I don't understand."

"Look, I saw some stuff when I was inside her head, or when she was in mine or whatever," the zombie grit out, the explanation far too sparse to make up for the blank spot his partner had been forced to suffer through. He was about to say so, but Hanna had managed to get one foot beneath himself and was manically intent on shoving the discussion further ahead. "Listen, did you ever remember seeing Veser's mom in real life? Like, ever?"

"No. But I dreamt of her."

He cast a quick, almost guilty look at Veser, uncomfortable, but the look in the teen's eyes was nothing if not firm. It was clear that, if nothing else, a simple yet brutal want of information would carry him through this.

"I saw her in my dreams very soon after she died. Was murdered." The Detective swallowed, skin prickling involuntarily at the memory of a tiny doll hand shoving into the folds of his split chest. The noise that came after. "It wasn't pleasant."

"She was in your dreams? _She_ was the reason you were asking about ghosts and dreams at the nekomata house?" Hanna demanded, slapping at his temple so brutally that the older man's eyes immediately locked onto his neck stitches. "Oh man, it all makes sense!"

Before the Detective could move to strongly refute even the possibility of that, Hanna grabbed his arm and looked up at him with his blue eyes blazing, round face both luridly green and deadly serious.

"_Nikolai_. Do you remember what happened the night you almost got mugged and I rescued you?"

"The night we met, yes." It seemed so painfully out of context that he had to restate it to make sure they were talking about the same thing – or even having the same conversation. He nodded, then haltingly began to recount it when Hanna's x-ray stare didn't lessen or waver. "I had a drink at the bar on twentieth, then left, then -"

"No, in between. You talked to someone."

"I can barely remember," he muttered, almost embarrassed. The truth was, he could only remember being very intoxicated, which was a miserable and mundane little something he didn't care to discuss at length in front of Conrad and the others. To his surprise, however, nothing more was needed: it seemed to be just what Hanna wanted to hear. The small zombie nodded, pointy features condensing almost fearsomely into a deep, knowing frown.

"Because she spelled you," he said shortly. "It was Veser's mom. She charmed your drink and confounded you because she was trying to get you defenseless and kill you. She'd been following you for a long, long time before that, too. She was the one I felt casting in that alleyway, when my homing rune started prickling for the first time."

Perhaps it was just Hanna's brutal rhetoric, but the clamp snapped off of his brainstem in one instant and brought with it a gush of images and memories, all too expansive for his paper-mache skull. Gaze pin-pointing on nothing, the Detective flashed back on that night and the baffling intensity of drunkenness that had sent him clattering against the brick wall at a simple push from a stranger. He remembered what happened after, and how quickly he sobered once he realized that his savior was nothing but a boy, almost as if the spell of the rum itself had been lifted. Next returned the hazy dream segments that had occurred before Ieda's violent attacks: every time he had turned around and those big green eyes were waiting for him, too close for comfort but too far to allow for words. She had been waiting for him, repeating the action as if in another life. It all came together.

"And the muggers?" he asked the black window, barely hearing himself say the words.

"Might have saved your life," Hanna said darkly.

"Hold the phone. _You_ were the one she was trying to kill?"

The whine, scratchy and sudden, came from their right. Hanna whirled on Veser as best he could from his awkward half-kneeling position, one hand still clamped into his partner's torn sleeve.

"Your mother was trying to kill someone when she was murdered and _you didn't think to tell us_?" Hanna grit out, expression downright livid. Veser put up his bandaged hands, instantly surly.

"The fuck, man, I didn't figure it was important. And she was always really fuckin' vague about it, okay? She wouldn't shut up about the big bad _thing_ that was gonna happen: I didn't know whether she was gonna cook a chicken or murder a man. Like I said, she went fuckin' bonkers before she got axed. I stopped listening months ago," the sea-witch snapped as he heaved himself up from the kitchen chair, then stopped to think about something and turned those acidic green eyes on the Detective, gaze simultaneously exacting and incredulous.

"But why the hell would she want to kill _you_? And why didn't she just do it? No offense, man. I'm sure you can lift a buck or two and that stink of yours would warn anybody off, but my mom knew her stuff. She could have fried you without a problem. Why'd she even take the time to drug you before trying to do it?"

The small yet sparse living room was left quiet as the grave in the wake of Veser's question. The older man could feel other questions and other suspicions knotting around every single head in the room, but most prominent of all was the rank vibration of utter confusion. However, mere minutes after being told that a powerful sea-witch had spent at least a few months attempting to murder him, and, even more shocking, with no success, the Detective rallied at least one clear thought. There were only two motivations he could see that would explain his would-be murderer's behavior: discretion or fear.

A look down at Hanna confirmed that they were on the same track. Unfortunately, that track ended a mere step from where they began it, and the only person who could answer their questions was already dead herself. Someone had killed her before she could kill him.

The older man frowned down at Hanna, feeling incredibly blank.

"If she was ... in your head, you must have known it was yours. Your memories are still inside you. What else did you see, Hanna?"

It took the small zombie a moment to process the change of subject. When he did, he abruptly shrank an inch or two, shoulders jerking inwards as if he were a wind-up doll and had been given a particularly jarring turn with a rusty key.

"Not a lot," he said uncomfortably, long green fingers falling from his sleeve to twine around each other as he clumsily hopped off the couch and put his weight on his other foot. The zombie bit his cheek and looked at the floor. "Just like … random stuff. Just … stuff."

The Detective was peripherally aware of several things in the room: Veser was about to open his mouth, maybe to demand that they begin searching for the man with the half-moon glasses again, and the older man knew that the vampire was still in the room and Conrad was likely horribly confused. But then the small zombie looked up, locking eyes with him, and the Detective remembered the previous night in the theater in vicious detail. He remembered the fear and the falling sensation of blacking out as Lee possessed him. What had happened before, and what Hanna said.

If Hanna had truly been inside his own head, where his locked memories were, there was a definite chance the possessed zombie had unconsciously pulled from the life he had before – and the moments before he died.

"And do you remember anything that happened?" The Detective swallowed, throat suddenly dry. Or maybe he had just noticed. "Anything you ... said?"

"No. I was on another planet." Hanna frowned, peering up at him dubiously. "Did I say something weird when she possessed me?"

His shoulders dropped, countered by a heady mixture of confusion and relief and disappointment rising to butt against the back of his raw throat. He cleared it away with a choked noise.

"We'll talk about it later. I'm just glad you're ..."

Words didn't fit. Not dead? Alive?

"Alright," the older man said faintly, exhaustion finally conquering him as he reached out and put a hand on Hanna's tiny shoulder, mouth tweaking stalely at the corners. It made him feel every bristle of his stiff, scummy-feeling facial hair and the weight underneath his eyes, but the zombie was solid underneath his hand, line of his bird-bone collar jutting into his palm. Hanna regarded him almost warily for a moment before returning the smile, after which they were solidly interrupted by the vampire and Conrad, the latter of which had lost the rising battle with the former's impatience.

Clearly the new undead addition to their group did not appreciate being shunted to the side, particularly when he had work to do. In a matter of minutes, the vampire had reclaimed the pathetic living room and began his reign of terror with gratuitous snarling and flashes of his long fangs, rushing everyone out of the area to keep them from 'harassing his patient.' As it was soon known, he had a long night and an early morning ahead of him if he expected to walk the unpleasantly thin line between frying and being skinned, _damnit._

Veser, having nowhere else to go, balled up in the corner and quickly passed into the undead doctor's periphery. On the 100-foot journey to his bedroom, the Detective stopped and gave Conrad a sideways look that stated quite clearly that there was a good deal that the other man wasn't telling him: especially concerning the vampire whom the older man had last seen in pore-level detail, pressing a knife to his quietly pulsing kidney, but who now appeared to be a doctor and somewhat under the coroner's sway. The surly creature could be called down like a half-trained dog, at the least, provided he could see the treat in hand and he also wanted to do the desired act, neither of which were circumstances the Detective was comfortable with. Conrad didn't seem entirely confident in their bond either.

This left the two men staring at the vampire, and then at each other, until Conrad gave a sigh that shook his whole body and put a hand to his forehead as Doc Worth yelled loudly enough to wake the whole floor and smacked Hanna across the back of the head, then blamed him for the resulting broken stitches.

"… Do I _really_ have to explain him?"


	38. Jigsaw

A/N: I meant to update yesterday but my new house doesn't have internet yet! (Read: I GOT A HOUSE YAAAAAY) So just PRETEND this whole thing is in italics.

_Warnings: obtuse symbolism, possession-induced/distorted flashback, a single curse word, present-tense abuse, scary shit, violence and blood._

* * *

Jigsaw

* * *

In the middle of the night, Hanna Falk Cross is being stalked around the corridors of a filthy city by a cold woman with silver hair, begging her to calm down even though he doesn't really remember why she's angry.

This should be more alarming than it is, but he's done this so many times before – the troll in the basement, the harpy in the attic – that he just keeps talking her down, shouting over his shoulder, and he's sure that they can reach some sort of agreement. He usually does, and he tries his best to make sure no one gets hurt in the process. But this doesn't feel like an ordinary flight – a thought which seems unimportant until a creeping, prickling feeling nearly liquefies his knees and a whole brick wall shuffs to the left and blocks off a familiar looking alley-way, slamming into place like thousand-pound legos and startling a curse from him.

The sound and the sudden blockage steals his breath, and he realizes he needs it. Suddenly stymied, Hanna looks down at his hands – his pink fingers and the sharpie stains creasing his scraped palms – and tries to think. Something is wrong. But it has to be a 'reality' kind of wrong, so when his mind doesn't readily contort to the new frame of consciousness and the woman screams his name again just an alley away, it really doesn't take much to get him running again.

He tries doors. Looking for something familiar; he _has_ to find something familiar to lead him out of here. The city is familiar, yes, but only just enough to be confusing: a Frankenstein jigsaw of textures, trailing sidewalks and individual street-lamps. The floating sense of inconclusiveness is everywhere.

He rattles another door handle, looking up over his shoulder. The electric blue undertone of the sky has him worried. He has to get inside.

He might drown.

It's an odd thought for being out on the streets with the air tasting like static and anger, but he finally stumbles into a house that's all black. He slams the door shut behind him and immediately trips. After reaching for a dangling light switch, shedding thin yellow light on a living room that had been abandoned in a hurry and left starved strips of wallpaper hanging off the rune-covered walls, Hanna overturns a sagging cardboard box. Unexpectedly, his life falls out and he stoops to gather the folders of scribbles, looking for something, something important that he wrote down that would help him.

The key.

He flips through them, racing the clock of _her_ bare feet slapping on the concrete outside, only to find he can't read any of them. That's bad. That's very, very bad.

He looks up from the scribbles. In the middle of the box, there's a picture of a tiny him with a man and a woman. They would be pretty, the woman red-haired and smiling, except their faces are blank and when he looks again, it's just him in the picture, older, with a dirty face and panic in his eyes. That age-old panic grows as footsteps come behind him.

He grabs up one folder, a red one, and he's running, running, running.

He runs through the abandoned house, wondering _how did this get so empty_ when she appears in the doorway of the kitchen, blocking the remains of the crumbling counters and gripping a curved knife in her fist.

"You gave that to the she-wolf."

There is rage in her: rage and fear. Her poison-green eyes are locked on the folder and Hanna tucks it under his arm. He feels the whip-like lashing of untied strings all around him: all that she failed to do while she was alive and all that now slithers towards them through the syrupy black air like nooses.

"You were not meant to give that to her. You don't know what you've done!"

She lunges for him – or the folder – with a high, inhuman scream, and he ducks through the rotting floor.

He hits the new level of the city on his hands and knees, red folder still in his hands. Fear frying him underneath his skin in electric blues, he starts running again before his knees even stop shaking, shoes scraping against the black ground. Hanna runs deeper into the city. Towards someone he lost. Not the man and the woman in the picture. That was too long ago. This is a fresh loss, ripe with responsibility and worry and eclipsing the niggling need to look for something familiar.

It's so strong that, when he hears a flap of wings, he banks left, beelining behind a featureless grey factory. Worth can't know.

He runs down what is suddenly a rooftop, sliding down the rest of the way and knocking off shingles, which clatter off and disappear into the abyss between the buildings. He swings down onto a fire escape, then hears a deep voice and a muted giggle from a square of yellow light. He can't help but pant as he drops down to the street and banks right, metal spiral of the notebook cutting into his hand. Lamont wouldn't know what to do.

He's alone.

That's fine, his checkered feet know that path. His mind knows the jigsaw city better than it should, and his intuition knows what hides in it.

Overwhelming secrecy carry him far and fast even as it wars with the far-away _shouldn't do it alone_ feeling, but he is good at doing things alone (out of necessity, out of practice, out of tragedy) and _damnit there wasn't any time_.

This is bigger than he thought. So much bigger. His hands tighten on the notebook unconsciously or consciously. It holds the key.

There is a huge building. A warehouse of some kind, or an abandoned club. Without thinking, without planning, he throws open the double doors.

Inside is a beacon of orange and a tie.

Hanna sees it, _dares_ to see it and runs towards it, suddenly buoyed with such relief and even joy. He was so worried. The worry ate at him and left him raw and rusty inside like pipes left in a cold wet basement, crusted with orangey _your fault_ because it found a way into everything. But everything seems right in this moment. He knew he could do it.

It was the right thing to do, after all.

"Oh man, you're here!"

Hanna runs towards him and, breath pushing out of him in laugh-like bursts, reaches out his hand. He looks up at the high ceiling and is telling him something – _I told you not to come _and_ three days is a long time to go missing_ and _Miss G was really worried _– when a hand claps down on his wrist. It's cold.

The man's skin is always warm. Feverishly warm, even. Hanna looks down and the woman with the silver hair is kneeling on the concrete floor where the man was, curved knife still in her fist.

Suddenly, a circle flares red all around them, intricate curling runes lighting up in the way that slick candle wax slithers from a wax-catcher. Staring down at her, Hanna feels the acrid coal-dust power knot up his back, power sealing them in and melding him to the floor. His throat works soundlessly as the uncomprehending fear wells under his sternum, and still her small white hand holds fast to his wrist, but now her other hand is empty.

"The first of seven, Hanna Cross," Ieda says and, behind him, a knife plunges between his ribs and deep into his arched back.

The pain is too much to feel, too much to think about. Disbelief paralyzes him then dissolves him in his frigid bony shell as he is stabbed six more times, each impact creating a stamping noise, then a sickening slop of warmth down the back of his calves. Red paints the concrete floor but the runes still glow with a nauseating brightness, sucking in the liquid. Blood seeps into the pages of the fallen red notebook – he didn't feel his cooling-greening fingers release it – and the words there drink it all in.

Hanna's bright blue eyes fight to roll back, to give up, but her green gaze holds him with sadness and determination and a warning. _The first of seven._

Then the curved blade slides deep for the seventh time and suddenly he is on a couch. There is no pain. All the images leak from his head like dirty water and he is snorting and sneezing – and forgetting.

Hanna Falk Cross wakes up.


	39. Bad Company

**A/N:** Oh my gosh, GUEST CHAPTER! By Raehimura! I am excite, and thus hand the mic over to her.

**RaeHimura**: If this feels like a big 'PSYCHE!" to all you slash fans out there … sorry? But Demyrie won't let me make them do the nasty, so this is what you get instead. It may not have the sexy boy-love, but it's a tribute to my dearest and everything she has accomplished with this amazing series. Thanks for letting me take them for a spin, baby!

Also, POV jumping is … bad? ^^ We'll just call it artistic license.

Lyrics are from "Renegade" by Styx

(Also, wow. We apologize, but school and work is eating our lives. Demyrie is in her fourth year of Biochemistry-Prepharmacy while moonlighting in the school costume shop, and I've sold my soul to the school paper and the GLBT. Neither is very conducive to being wordy on a regular and reliable basis! But if you're still in this, so are we~)

_Warnings: language, smarmy Cas, drug-induced sappy Cas, Ominous Rumblings, implied het and super awkward not-slash. Oh, and well-researched drug use (Drugs are bad, mmmm'kay?)._

* * *

Bad Company

* * *

The dodgiest bar in the dodgy part of their already dodgy city was, unsurprisingly, one of Cas' favorite places. It was always good for a cheap drink, the bartender knew his usual – a special combination of liver-destroying liquids that would down a lesser man – and no matter how many times he visited, he could always find some schmuck to hustle for ammo money.

Cas hadn't suggested a visit to Happy Endings in months, and Finas, perhaps slightly relieved, hadn't pushed it. But the younger hunter insisted that their recent string of successful hunts – a weeklong whirl of squealing tires, victorious shouts and the wet thud of well-aimed stakes – left them needing a break and a reward. Finas knew what was coming the second he saw the wicked glint in Cas' good eye, but only shook his head after he'd already nodded his partner to the car.

Why Cas was so partial to a place that made even Finas shudder at the myriad of suspicious stains it claimed was completely beyond him.

Cas was practically vibrating the whole ride across town. Testosterone, adrenaline and victory sung through his limbs; he couldn't stop grinning at the thought of people and noise and _life_ after so many nights of silent, cramped tracking. Even Finas seemed ready to relax, and the thought loosened some undefined knot deep in Cas' gut.

He couldn't help it: red leather tight across his chest and grin as confident as his grip on a pistol, Cas strode through the doors like he owned the place. He may have needed glamor to hide his eye, but he sure as hell didn't need any help to be the hottest stud in this particular hole in the wall – and from the alternately appreciative and furious eyes pinned on him, both the ladies and their boyfriends knew it.

Cas paused to wink at the busty redhead eying him over a pool table, ignoring the warning flush on the face of the 6'4" brute behind her. The low-dipping leopard print of her top earned her an extended stare; the university sweatshirt and quarterback-wide shoulders of her boyfriend earned her a smarmy grin.

"Her date looks angry, and intoxicated," Finas said mildly from his left. "Not a winning combination."

"That troll? I can take him," Cas drawled, cracking his knuckles with a flashy smirk.

"It's a little early in the night to get bloody, isn't it? You haven't even had a drink."

"True," the younger man agreed, looking almost disappointed to turn away from the posturing frat boy. But an easier smile replaced his smirk as he slung an arm around his partner's shoulders and steered him towards the sagging bar. "And that, my man, is a mistake we must correct."

The tequila tasted like floor cleaner, but Finas accepted his shot without even a raised eyebrow, so Cas told the bartender to keep them coming.

Cas watched Finas knock back a shot, expression immovable, before downing his with a little grimace.

"Isn't this great?" Cas gushed, leaning in to talk over the blaring mullet rock.

Finas just looked at him blankly, but Cas beamed insistently, obliviously, until he gave in.

"I suppose it was … time for a break," Finas admitted, as the next round of shots slid across the sticky bar.

Toasting to much needed rest – or was it to a whole nest of fangs reduced to scattered ash? – they downed the cheap liquor simultaneously, shot glasses hitting the wood with a sharp double crack.

Cas nodded his head like something important had been decided and, with a slap to Finas' shoulder and a low chuckle, swaggered over to the pool tables.

By the time Finas had switched his drink to the mellower burn of Tennessee Rye and turned back around, Cas had managed to both get an arm around one tipsy Trash Barbie and start a very impressive pulsing in her boyfriend's temple. Thankfully, after a few rounds of chest-thumping, Cas wrapped his fist around a pool cue instead of the guy's neck.

He didn't even need to hustle the man; he was so high on testosterone and the thought of impressing his girlfriend that he looked right past Cas' confident hands to the $50 he'd laid out as a bet.

A few unsurprisingly one-sided rounds later, Cas was so absorbed in lining up his shot – in not just winning but absolutely humiliating the frat boy – that he barely noticed when his head started bobbing. It was when he aced the shot, three balls dropping into corner pockets with sharp thuds, and he whirled around to indulge in a little showboating, that he actually heard the song.

_The jig is up, the news is out, they finally found me. The renegade who had it made retrieved for a bounty. Never more to go astray. This'll be the end today of the wanted man._

Cas caught his partner's eyes with a flashing smirk that was all rockstar, and definitely knew it.

Even Finas couldn't hold back a smile.

Cas shot him another grin, a real one, wide and blinding. Frat Boy looked ready to shout the secret brotherhood cry and round up a posse. But Casimiro was feeling generous – he waved over two more shots of Tequila and passed one to him, cheerily offering a toast.

There are few things that change a man's tune faster than free liquor.

By the end of the third game, Frat Boy was leaning on his cue stick like it was the only thing keeping him vertical, and even Cas had missed three balls in a row. He snickered a little to himself and waved off the game, sharing one last toast with the glassy-eyed meathead before turning to wave his pile of winnings at his partner. But he didn't immediately connect with the heavy, familiar weight of Finas' gaze like he usually did, and when he searched for him, what he saw at the bar brought him up short.

Finas. Talking to someone. Without looking like he might go for his gun any second.

And it was a _girl_. Not the most attractive thing in the place, and she looked like she came with complimentary matching baggage – leave it to Finas to have a thing for the tragic ones – but Cas wasn't going to complain about the first girl Finas showed any interest in for a reason other than her possible possession of fangs.

Finas barked out a laugh, one deep note that made it to Cas' ears across the room, and the older man looked surprised at it himself. The girl smiled back, a wan but genuine flicker, and Cas could just imagine Finas' insides melting. He had a very selective soft spot, but when a certain sob story or charity case hit it, he turned into putty.

Seeing them together reminded Cas of before, of times when Finas was at least a little more than a grim bodyguard posted at the bar. Made him feel a little giddy, a little crazy. He downed the last shot on the tray, relishing the burn as he headed back to the bar to get something different, stronger. But his path was cut off by bottle-blond hair and a sinful smile.

"I haven't seen you around here before." The words dripped like honey out of a pair of plasticky blood-red lips.

"I've been away for a while, on … business," Cas tossed out, dripping charm and giving her a once over. "But if this is what I can expect to find, I may have to become a regular."

"You know, we don't get many of your type in here. You look like the kind a guy who knows how to have some _real_ fun." Flawless silver nails slid under his collar and she leaned in close, pulling a baggy out of some hidden pocket and waving it clandestinely between them. "Wanna have some with me?"

It didn't take much to guess what she was offering. Every other time, he had waved off the drugs and suggested a relocation to the bathroom or the back of the building. But everything was so fucking perfect right now, and nights like this were always short – and, now, in short supply. Why not live it up, do something he'd never done? Something just for himself, just because it felt good, damn it.

Why not lose control? He could trust Finas (could always trust Finas) to take care of things for a while. Looking down at the gleam in her already hazy eyes and the promise of curves pressing against him, the weight of the gun at the small of his back was suddenly the last thing on his mind.

"Hell, yeah."

* * *

When Cas first woke up, he had no idea how much time had passed since that last shot of cheap Tequila. He was mildly surprised to find that he didn't care. His next thought, his first upon waking for the last seven years, was where Finas was and whether he was safe. Thoughts of Finas – solid, bad-ass, _safe_ Finas – had him smiling redolently into the fizzing air.

Cas blinked and it took his heavy lids three days to make it back up. The mellow light from the low-hanging lamp was still jumping and sparking erratically, like there were sparklers in his eyes, like his vision was carbonated. He stretched his arm across the slick satin of the sheets, existence reduced to the cool slide and bright red beneath him.

The color pulled at his dark skin, blurred his edges. It was all there was. The entire world was a smooth, vibrant cradle.

He shifted and felt himself melt into the liquid caress of the satin. He heard a groan, muffled and close, and he'd just come around to recognizing his own voice when it was answered by a lyrical giggle somewhere out in the red. With an impressive amount of concentration, Cas managed to turn his head and find the bundle of blond hair and smooth skin lounging next to him, a landscape of bare hills and hollows.

He didn't know her name, could barely remember following her coy wink up the stairs, but he knew absolutely and without a doubt that she was perfect. Fascinating. Sex personified. She'd pressed that little bitter slip against his tongue and pressed him against the wall with a wicked grin. When she'd touched him, barely grazing over the scattered scars on his forearm, and he literally saw fireworks, he knew he was in for a rough night.

Slumped bonelessly into the mattress, more satiated and strung-out than he'd ever been, Cas grinned up at her in wonder as she pushed up on her elbows. He reached over slowly, pressing the tips of his fingers to the peak of her shoulder. She was amazing, all warm and shifting and alive and so damn soft. He slid his fingers down her arm, watching the skin pool and fold beneath the pressure and the tendons bulge as she reached up for him. Their hands met in the middle, and just the brush of her fingers on his palm made him huff out a breath.

He thought he might be in love with her.

With a syrupy grin, he rolled them over and pressed down against her. The sudden motion made the world spin, but it didn't matter, because there were a thousand points of light sparking on every inch of them that pressed and scraped and her eyes were the most amazing shade of green like the glass bottle of his favorite beer and her smile was so sweet he just wanted to hold her there and never let go. He couldn't remember ever going this long without thinking of guns.

From the new angle, the gold shimmer of her hair was so _bright. _It was almost glowing, an unwavering shine in the swirling eddies of the air around them. He opened his mouth to ask about it, or maybe just to tell her that she was amazing, but there was a clicking sound near his ear and then his jaw clenched closed in a hard spasm.

Cas jerked, panic stabbing through the pleasant haze, but before he could twist away, she leaned up and brushed a kiss to the stubble on his jaw. The spasm ended and relief flooded through him, leaving him even more languid than before. He thanked her with a slow, wandering kiss, a hand skimming the plush softness of her curves, and then for a while there was nothing but the angles of their bodies fitting together and the slide of skin against skin against satin.

He saw the air vibrate before he heard the words, a dark static in the tidal pools that tugged at his attention. It meant something important, more important than the goddess underneath him and the tingle of her lips on his neck and everything else.

The sound repeated, and he was still trying to put meaning to the tangle of syllables when he recognized the source, turning his head to stare into the vague darkness outside their red cocoon.

"Casimiro?"

* * *

Finas hadn't seen his partner leave. One minute, Cas was chatting up a particularly enthralled conquest and the next, he was nowhere to be seen. Finas tried not to completely disregard Elaine – a nice woman, a widow, who was so happy to find someone interested in hearing about her late husband – as he scanned the room for his partner, but his instincts had settled heavy and implacable in his gut.

That woman had been just Cas' type, curvy and easy, so Finas told himself it was the usual story and set a mental timer. The first half hour passed. And another. And another.

Two hours after he'd last seen Cas, Finas was officially worried.

He excused himself from the conversation and cased the bar, asking if anyone had seen his partner or that woman. A table in the back said she was a regular with quite the appetite for men, but harmless otherwise. A group of girls started shouting about 'old whores' and laughing loudly. The bartender mentioned that she rented a room upstairs.

Finas climbed the narrow staircase, scowling darkly and rehearsing his speech about communication and responsibility and _making him worry._

He called out the younger man's name just before he got to the door, hoping to avoid getting treated to a show. He'd learned that lesson the hard way.

He waited a beat, but there was no sound from inside the room. Swallowing back the pulse of worry-or-anger, Finas pushed open the unlocked door and called out for him again. The first thing he saw was skin. A lot of it.

He was about to turn around and wait for them to compose themselves – maybe go back down to the bar and ponder the mystery of Cas' hyper-potent youth over another glass of whiskey – when Cas looked over at him. Finas' eyes stuck on the bright flush across his cheeks and down his neck, the pupil of his unglamored eye that was strangely dilated in the dim light and, most of all, the confused twist of his mouth.

"Casimiro?" he repeated yet again, suddenly feeling like he was talking to a stranger.

It took a second to sink in, but then Cas was sitting up and grinning over at him, the ripple of compact muscle under coffee-brown skin thankfully ending at a conveniently placed sheet. "Finas!" he drawled cheerily. "I was wondering where you were."

"You knew where I was," Finas started, slowly, confused by the statement and the slur in the other man's voice. "I was downstairs, where you left me. I, on the other hand, had no idea where you were."

"Oh, well, I met someone," Cas explained, gesturing sloppily to the girl behind him. "Finas, this is … well, um … well, she's awesome."

Finas looked around Cas' shoulder to where the blond was lounging, eyes lidded and not a hint of shame. "Charmed," he responded dryly.

When Cas laughed, it was short and high, practically a giggle. And then Finas understood.

"You're high," he announced evenly, torn between amusement and some more appropriate reaction.

Cas snorted another laugh, dropping back on his elbows. "Yeeeah. So?"

Finas turned away from the expanded view his partner was now exhibiting, clearing his throat unnecessarily. "I think it's time for us to leave, Casimiro."

"But-" the younger man started, a little pout in his tone.

"It's okay, darlin," the woman spoke up, all patience and goodwill and smeared aqua eyeshadow. "Your friend really wants to go. I wouldn't want to keep you. I'll just go back down to the bar and squeeze some free shots outta Stan."

There was a rather wet sounding good-bye, and a few long moments of laughing and stumbling sounds as clothing was sorted out, and then her too-familiar hand was squeezing Cas' arm before she edged around him out the door. When the door swung shut, Finas finally looked up.

Cas, thankfully, had his pants back in place and was struggling into his undershirt. When he managed to get it mostly in place, he collapsed back onto the edge of the bed and Finas took the few steps over to him, laying a hand on his thin shoulder.

Cas looked up at him with wide, relaxed eyes, gaze so open that it sparked a protective surge in Finas, made it almost almost painless to remember the warmth of a little body as he tucked in bright pink sheets and a rose-covered comforter, pulling them tight against the darkness of the closet door. Finas found himself fighting the urge to smile fondly, or even run his fingers through his partner's bed-tousled hair.

And then he looked closer, noticed the shine in his eyes and the muzzy, indistinct trust spilling from him, like a child too young to think about monsters in the dark. Finas drew his hand back, tightened it into a fist.

They were hunters. They couldn't afford to be compromised, couldn't afford to let their guard down. Not if they wanted to live through the night. After the last seven years, Cas knew better – and the thought of what could distract from such a hard-fought lesson tightened the knot in Finas' gut.

"You're mad," Cas said with a frown, focusing on him with some difficulty and sounding incredibly sad about it.

"You're putting yourself in unnecessary danger." Finas tried to keep his tone even, but it still came out sharp.

"I don't want you to be mad."

"Then don't behave this way."

"Lighten up, Fin," Cas tossed out, rolling his eyes. "'M just havin' fun. You know, _living_ a little." Cas snorted at his own joke. Finas felt sick.

"How much more of this kind of 'living' do you think you can take?"

"What do you mean? I feel better than I have all year." Cas grinned liked there was nothing wrong in the entire world. "Things have been awesome."

"You're losing control," Finas said bluntly, laying out his case in clipped, controlled syllables. "Last week you went without sleep until we tracked down every single creature from that nest. You've been going out of your way to pick fights with men who could actually hurt you. And you've been with more women in the last few weeks than you have in the entire year before that."

"Aw, Fin, are ya jealous?"

Finas pushed on, voice dark. "And now I find you completely defenseless with a woman we don't know, in a location that is in no way safe, without even assuring that I was aware of the risk. I didn't even know where you were, Cas. Anything could get to you like this. Don't tell me that you're fine."

"Maybe this is fine for me," Cas tossed back with a careless little shrug. "Maybe this is the way I want to live."

"If you keep up this kind of behavior, you're putting that 'living' part at risk."

"Well I'm on a bit of a short leash where that's concerned anyway, right?"

"Cas – "

"Fuck, Finas, there's so much I haven't done," Cas snapped, grin vanishing as he stood up into Finas' space, expression more earnest than upset. "So much to experience. And every second I spend doing normal things, doing nothing, it feels like I'm crawling out of my skin. Like I can feel the timer counting down."

"So you want to go out like this?" Finas held his tone rigidly even, logical, verbally treading into places he had only just begun to think about, late as it was. "Give up on any chance we might have to –

Cas cut him off with a laugh, but instead of rough and depreciating like it should have been, it was like he actually found the whole thing hilarious. "Don't you understand? There is no way out. You know it too, man. You _know_ it."

He stepped back, gesturing broadly. "This is all the time I have left. I just want to enjoy it."

"I understand that."

"No, you don't." Cas smiled light and disconnected, untouchable.

Sick with the sight of that smile, Finas found himself snapping back, voice brittle. "Well, then you might try explaining it."

"You want me to explain?" Cas shouted, anger wild and instant, jarring in its contrast to that loopy smile of a second before. "You want me to tell you all about what it's like to be on death row, to be so close to the grave you've already got a foot in? How about the sucking hole in my chest where a _person_ used to be? Is that what you want to hear? I hunt and fight and drink all night to try and forget for _one goddamn _second that I'm not two steps away from that evil fucker getting his claws into me – and he already has!"

Finas' eyes were hunter sharp, but his voice was careful. "What do you mean?"

Half-turned away, Cas looked lost for a moment, like the room around them had disappeared from his eyes – or he was seeing something completely different. His voice was small and hollow, impossibly far away.

"Something happened, to _me_, when I made the deal. Something changed, something _more_ than the eye and everything else. It's like … its like I'm not alone, in here, in my skin."

Cas' swallowed with a audible click in the suffocating silence. He swiped clumsy fingers through a soaked orangey fringe and Finas wanted nothing more than to get lost in that motion, to focus on the chemical stink and the tacky slide of his poisoned sweat, and let the words he could barely comprehend wash over him without finding a hold.

"I could always see hidden stuff, evil stuff, but it's worse now. So much fucking worse. Fire and shadows and rotted shit in the corner of my eyes, pushing over into everything else. I can see 'em all. Dead people. Other ... things, things that don't even come close to the shit we hunt. It's like I'm _seeing_ hell. Right into hell. And if that's –" Cas sucked in a tight breath, fingers clenching into his hair, voice rising into a near-sob. "– if that's really where I'm fuckin' going, I just – I can already feel it right behind my fuckin' eyes, Finas – and I don't know … I'm just afraid –"

"Stop."

And he did. Finas' words may have been a helpless denial, a blind rejection of his own knee-jerk instincts, but all Cas heard was an order. It was the most comforting thing he could imagine.

The younger hunter deflated, drained of anger and urgency and, at least for the moment, once again focused on the present. He stepped close, hands splaying on his partner's thick chest as if in supplication, and they stood a surreal moment in the wake of Cas' monstrous confession. And confession it was; his judge perhaps more terrified than he.

The young man's clammy touch – and the unresponsive gaze halved by that ghastly, milk-white orb – finally cracked Finas' shock, pushed him beyond that claustrophobic, low-lit attic and into the future of a man 'invaded' by a presence he couldn't describe. A future that halted, suddenly, with the unthinkable: that he might truly have to end Cas' life before his seven years were up. He could hardly comprehend the cutting irony of the whole confrontation, much less fathom his own dark mindset. Finas had his prejudices, among which was a zealous mistrust of any and all magic, but if his partner – his friend, his companion, his lifeline – was falling sway to a demon, it would really be the only option.

But logic and experience and a small lifetime of well-earned fears and he-would-want-it-that-way's had never left his mind seared so blank, or his chest so uncomprehendingly tight.

Drawing in a soundless breath, Finas had just turned his mind to the best way to bundle a pliant Cas back to the car when the hands on his chest pushed up, over his wide shoulders, and slid slowly over the planes of his back. The younger hunter watched in fascination as his hands disappear, leaning in as they dropped farther, until he was plastered to Finas' chest.

"Cas?" Finas asked, amazed at his own steady voice.

"Fin, you're just so … strong," he mumbled, nosing into the thick cord of muscle in his partner's shoulder. The brush of breath against his skin made Finas shudder to his core, whole body stiff as iron. "Always have been."

Cas pressed closer – just _feeling_ the fabric of that stuffy dress shirt scraping his bare shoulders and the single neat row of buttons wedging against his chest – and slid against the familiar spans of his partner's body almost absently, a small pleased hum swelling in the back of his throat.

"Always there. Watching my back."

Finas said nothing, did nothing, just stood there trying to think around the fever burn of the body against him. He scrounged for explanations other than the obvious – or anything that would get him away from the gaping possibility Cas had forced on him, even if it shunted him into another age-old fear. Because, really, it wasn't as if he hadn't thought about it.

Once or twice, on dark nights when the reality of their job pressed in and took away the option of denial, the facts lined up before him like fuses waiting to be lit. Cas was a sensual person. He was young, hormonal. And he'd already demonstrated the lengths he was willing to go for Finas. The way they lived – in each other's pockets with no one else to rely on, a constant cycle of risking and saving – it wouldn't be impossible for things to get tangled up, to shade in the empty little spaces between partner and family and _everything_.

Finas had known this, when he let himself think about it, just as surely as he'd known that if it ever came down to that, it would be over.

He'd never be able to deny the petulant young hunter something he wanted – not something like affection, like care, when he asked for it so little – especially not with just a handful of years dwindling before them. If Cas asked, Finas would give, even over the stringent objections of his own nature. But that one night of leniency would bear a heavy price: it would destroy him just as completely as it would destroy 'them.' And Cas, filled with visions of a soldier-partner-soulmate who could fill the void left in the absence of small talk and taxes and bank lines, would never be able to understand that Finas had nothing to give him.

He'd already given him everything he had left.

"Casimiro," Finas tried again as he eased the young man back to look him in the eye, voice painstakingly calm but silently pleading. Pushing to get through that glassy sheen, laser-sight focused on that goal.

Cas let himself be maneuvered but didn't move back, focusing blearily on his partner's face. The weight of that scrutiny – the sheer pressure of possibility that forced the air from his lungs – made Finas want to run, to punch him, to take hold of time itself and just make this _stop_.

Cas swayed a little, moved as if to lean in again, and Finas flinched. His grip on Cas' shoulders tightened reflexively but not enough to hold him back. He swallowed against the surge of panic. Hated himself for the burning certainty that, even knowing it would destroy them, he couldn't push Cas away. Especially after tonight.

Then, abruptly, Cas stopped. Blinked up at Finas like it was the first time he'd seen him. Furrowed his brow and took a deliberate step back, out of his partner's grip.

When he didn't say anything, they just looked at each other, and Finas tracked the pieces of Casimiro coming back together in his good eye. Then Cas tried to take another step back and flailed perilously, knees and balance failing.

For once, Finas didn't move to catch him. Cas fell onto the bed with a chuckle, sprawling bonelessly across the sheets with that dreamy, untouchable smile back in place.

"Don't be so serious, Finny."

"One of us has to be," Finas bit back without thinking, a stern needle of reproach. He knew Cas wasn't himself right now, wasn't in control, but to put him through this ... and worse, to have no idea what he was doing. That glassy gaze couldn't see the muted terror in Finas' straight back, the horror of looking at Cas and seeing a complete stranger, or the echoes of panic and fear and loss that sight set off – he was gone right now, and soon, maybe sooner than Finas had ever thought, he'd be gone for a lot longer.

Cas just smiled up at him, closing his eyes like he was about to drift off. "Whatever you say, man."

Finas let out a breath, and with it, some of the tension. He'd never known Cas to back down from something he wanted, so whatever just happened, it was the drugs talking. He felt a little like he'd dodged a bullet – a feeling he knew in a literal way most people never would – and it was enough to get him focused on the important things: get Cas to a safe place, force some fluids into him, make sure he didn't have a bad reaction in his sleep. Lecture him for a month about responsible behavior.

Avoid obsessing about what Cas had told him, about everything Cas was living through moment by moment – didn't that make him the worst of hypocrites when he lectured about self-preservation?

And watch him. Watch him with a care and a closeness that made his heart ache prematurely for the rancid suspicions that black magic and rash decisions had forced between them.

Finas stooped down and manhandled Cas to his feet, propping him up with an arm around his back and shouldering his weight.

"Hmm?" Cas hummed, disconnected. His voice was hazy and his movements slow, eyes half-lidded, but there seemed to be some part of _him_ coming back to the surface. "What're we ..."

"Are you all right?" Finas asked, slowly and carefully, like he was talking to a child. He had an objective, and it felt good to be sure in his steps, but the anger and the worry and the heavy burden of knowledge couldn't be extinguished as easily as it could be set aside.

"I'm, uh – tired." It seemed to be the only word he could dredge up, but the heavy droop of his muscles against Finas' shoulder didn't deny it.

The older man sighed, heavy and exhausted himself, but his voice was all patience and determined steel. "Let's get you home, then."

Cas nodded languidly, still drifting and probably not entirely sure what was happening. But he put one foot in front of the other and didn't make a fuss, so Finas just tightened his grip and held his stringy body up as they stumbled down the stairs.

Still, as he hauled his partner's dead weight through the thinning bar crowd and out into the night, he couldn't shake the feeling that Cas was slipping through his fingers. That if he let go – and if he had no other choice, at least he would do it with his own two shaking hands and a pistol – they would both be lost.

If he held on a little tighter on the way to the car, Cas didn't seem to mind. Their night ended with the slam of two car doors and Finas, hands tight on the wheel, led them back to the shuttered and bolted apartment they called home. The hum of the motor and the syrupy rhythm of Cas' breath in the seat next to him was almost calming, leaving him all the sadder for it.

Above them, a shadow parted from a nest of industrial piping and came to balance on the edge of the rooftop. It's tattered coat lay unstirred in the winter wind as it watched the old car turn the corner, the parting flash of headlights turning scratched glass lenses into glowing eyes in the haunting yellow fog of the streetlamps.


End file.
